Natasha Vernooij
Ph.D., University of Michigan (expected: June 2024)
M.S., University of Michigan
B.S., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Email: vernooij (at) umich (dot) edu
Wildflowers in the Andes Mountains, Baños, Ecuador
Welcome! I'm Natasha.
I am a PhD Candidate in psychology working with Dr. Julie Boland and Dr. Rick Lewis at the University of Michigan. I research how bilinguals manage grammatical differences between their languages. My current work focuses on how bilinguals understand codeswitches in locations where the grammars of two languages are different, with a focus on adjective/noun word order in Spanish and English. I use methods such as corpus analyses, acceptability judgment tasks, and reading time tasks to study these codeswitches.
I support and engage in open science practices, and you can find my work (methods, stimuli, data, code, etc.) on GitHub and OSF. I am particularly interested in projects that reduce or remove barriers to being involved in research.
When I'm not doing research, you can find me in the ceramics studio or playing with my cat, Pumpkin.
About Me
My interest in language started early: my parents immigrated to the U.S. from the Netherlands and they taught me to speak Dutch so that I could talk with my family. In elementary school, I started taking Spanish classes and continued my Spanish education and eventually majored in Hispanic Linguistics at UNC-Chapel Hill. My interest in psychology developed in high school when I took my first psychology class. In undergrad, I worked in various labs (the Carolina Affective Science Lab with Dr. Kristen Lindquist, the Language, Cognition, and Brain Lab with Dr. Peter Gordon, and the Bergelson Lab with Dr. Elika Bergelson) and majored in Psychology. Now in grad school, I combine my interests in bilingualism and psychology to research how bilinguals use both of their languages.