People

I answer the emails and help everyone use the equipment and facilities at the Centre for Comparative Psycholinguistics. I completed my BA (Hons) in Linguistics in 2003 and spend my free time gardening, reading, and house-training three boys and two cats.

My research is in experimental linguistics and psycholinguistics. I am and have been interested in a variety of topics and phenomena, but by current research mainly comes in two flavours

• Understanding pronoun processing in speech: looks into how pre-school aged children and adults comprehend ambiguous pronouns, and how various linguistic and contextual factors (for example, information structure) as well as individual difference factors (for example, vocabulary skills) affect that process.

• Understanding then role of individual differences in the comprehension of socially charged language: looks into how people's moral and political views and various personality-based traits affect language (and speaker) perception, processing, prediction and pragmatic inferencing.

My research looks at prosody, which is the rhythm and melody of speech. Prosody performs many different linguistic functions, for example distinguishing questions from statements or highlighting new information. But what exactly prosody does and how it does it differs between languages, which is one of the reasons why I enjoy comparing different languages, often in collaboration with others. I am also very interested in how prosody interacts with other areas of grammar, like syntax.

My research involves figurative language, or essentially when it seems people don’t “say what they mean”. For instance, metaphor (“my laptop is a dinosaur”), verbal irony (“nice weather” about a hurricane), metonymy (“nice ride” for a car), and hyperbole (“that’ll take forever”), etc. We attempt to discern how people comprehend (and why they use) figurative language given its seeming disconnect from so-called “literal meaning”. Some current projects involve metaphors for morality, enabling language learners to master L2 idioms, how multiple forms of figurative language function to serve people’s social needs and motivations, figurative language and humor, and investigations of how figurative language functions holistically as a form of meaning-making.

My research primarily focuses on early speech perception and the development of the lexicon. I am interested in how speech input affects the developing perceptual system and what types of information are useful in word learning. Currently I have two main, but related, research interests: 

Using speech to acquire language: This is my primary focus in which I examine the properties of speech that are useful to infants when learning their native language.

Sound symbolism in early development: I have been investigating whether sound symbolism can be used (or is used) as a tool in language development"

I conduct research on heritage language acquisition, which is the acquisition of languages that immigrant children use at home with their family. My current projects examine how the two languages of immigrant children influence each other, as well as the environmental, socio-affective, and linguistic factors that affect intergenerational heritage language transmission. 

My research interest lies in the intersection of linguistic phonetics and cognitive science. On the one hand, I study the physical and physiological aspects of speech: acoustics and articulation of speech sounds. On the other hand, I study the mental construct for which speech is generated and processed: perception and the relationship between perception and production. Most of my work has been focused on linguistic voice quality: how the timbre of people’s voices manifests linguistic contrasts (e.g., lexical tones), besides its use in talker characteristics and paralinguistic information. Currently I explore how people learn to use voice quality in daily life and language.

My research interest lies in the intersection of linguistic phonetics and cognitive science. On the one hand, I study the physical and physiological aspects of speech: acoustics and articulation of speech sounds. On the other hand, I study the mental construct for which speech is generated and processed: perception and the relationship between perception and production. Most of my work has been focused on linguistic voice quality: how the timbre of people’s voices manifests linguistic contrasts (e.g., lexical tones), besides its use in talker characteristics and paralinguistic information. Currently I explore how people learn to use voice quality in daily life and language.

Vera holds a BA from McGill University (2018) and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge (2019). She joined the University of Alberta as a PhD student in 2021, focusing on structural priming in the L1 and L2 of Mandarin-English heritage bilinguals and late bilinguals. She has also worked on intervention effects in the processing of relative clauses by L2 English learners, as well as the acquisition of wh-questions by Mandarin heritage bilingual children. Outside of linguistics, Vera enjoys art, cooking, history, and classics.

My research examines the influence of language nuance on expectation-informed language processing. More specifically, I'm interested in the effects of using more vs. less nuanced language on processing of expectation-violating information, how these effects influence listener perceptions of speaker, and the modulating role of individual differences.  

I am a PhD candidate currently investigating the role of information structure and implicit causality in co-reference processing in English and Spanish. I obtained a BA from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (2018) and a MSc from the University of Alberta (2020). I started my doctoral program at the University of Alberta in 2021 under the supervision of Dr. Juhani Järvikivi and Dr. Lila Daskalaki. I am also the Heritage Language Lab coordinator where I am part of a project that studies cross-linguistic influence and environmental factors with Spanish-English bilinguals. In my spare time, I enjoy reading Latin-American contemporary fiction, watching movies, and indoor cycling.  

My research interests lie primarily at the intersection of bilingual acquisition and nominal reference processing. I'm currently investigating how speakers of Chinese languages and English learn to refer to entities out in the world, and what individual background factors such as age and input play a role.

My research interests include gender neutral pronoun processing, grammatically ambiguous sentences, and the role individual differences play in language.

My current research focuses on examining the processing of gender neutral pronouns and how factors such as age, political orientation, empathy, and personality shape this process. Outside of research, I enjoy cooking, playing violin, and working on cars. 

My research interests centre around the role expectations play in language processing and the use of cues to influence interpretation of language, both of which align with my background in psychology & perception-- specifically how the world around us interacts with our previous knowledge to create our perception. I am also fascinated by the development of language processing across the human lifespan, and the various factors that determine how language processing presents itself.