Research

We conduct research on various aspects of human cognition related to language processing. In particular, our lab is interested in the interrelation between grammar and processing. We have been running experiments on processing at various linguistic levels (e.g., speech, words, sentences and discourse) and the relation between language and general cognitive processes. Our current research projects include relative-clause processing & translations in East Asian languages and English, processing issues in linguistic theories in terms of grammaticality and acceptability judgments, processing syntactic ambiguity, syntactic adaptation, on-line composition of event structures, Mandarin tone sandhi, the conceptualization of nouns in terms of mass/count distinction and nominal classification, negation and acquisition of counterfactuality, and the perception of tones and vowels in Mandarin. If you are interested in becoming an intern, a research assistant, a research affiliate or conducting independent study with Prof. Lin, you are welcome to send an email to Professor Charles Lin.

Research Projects

• Issue of how the phonological systems of the first language affects the processing of as second language(e.g., how the phonotactics of Korean affects their perception of English non-words)

• Cross-linguistic corpus analysis of translated Chinese text

• Processing of head-final relative clauses (e.g., Chinese, Korean)

• Relative clause processing within context

• Processing restrictive and non-restrictive relatives in Chinese

• Processing tones and tone sandhi

• Issue of phonological awareness and literacy (e.g., the role of Pin-Yin and Zhu-Yin in Mandarin syllable perception)

• Processing arguments and adjuncts in sentences

• Mass/Count cognition at the syntax-semantics interface

• Perception of vowels and tones in Mandarin Chinese

• Resolution of lexical & syntactic ambiguity in sentences

• Syntactic adaptation & structural priming

• Processing quantificational scopes at LF

• Processing negation and acquisition of counterfactuality

Equipment

LaCL at Indiana University Bloomington is located at GA2036, which we use as a meeting room and the space for running behavioral and corpus studies. We share a portable eye-tracker with the APLE lab in GA2049 where we also run behavioral studies on E-prime 3.0. We run our EEG studies on a 32-channel EEG system manufactured by BrainVision (the actiCHamp system) in Psychology Building. Prof. Lin also collaborates with various other language-related faculty on campus; therefore, an array of other psycholinguistic methodology is available.