Lauren Covey

I completed my PhD at the University of Kansas in 2018 under the supervision of Alison Gabriele and Robert Fiorentino. My dissertation, which was funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, the William Orr Dingwall Foundation, and the journal Language Learning, was titled, "An ERP investigation of individual differences in the processing of wh-dependencies by native and non-native speakers." I joined the faculty at Montclair State University in Fall 2018 in the Linguistics Department, where I co-run the Experimental Linguistics Laboratory and teach undergraduate and graduate courses in linguistics and cognitive science.

My research examines sentence processing in both native speakers and adult second language (L2) learners, with a focus on the processing of long-distance syntactic dependencies. I use psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic methods to investigate language processing, including electroencephalography (EEG). Since coming to Montclair State, I have begun a related strand of research focusing on bilingual processing to build on the strengths of our diverse multilingual student population. This research is in line with my interests in individual variability in language processing, with my new work aiming to understand the relative contribution of cognitive resources such as memory, attention, and chunking abilities to language comprehension