Current research projects
Current research projects
Written language offers an important lens through we can better understand how we store and access language. What linguistic properties are captured in the language's writing system can vary drastically cross-linguistically, and what aspect's of a writing system we are sensitive to as readers and speakers of the language can vary extensively as well. This research explores how a language's writing system affects psycholinguistic processing, particularly in languages with multiple different scripts. The broader aim is to reinvigorate interest in writing within the study of language. How does the writing system constrain the language, and what can we glean about the language itself?
How do heritage learners process spoken and written language? How do patterns of processing differ amongst learners with differing levels of proficiency, particularly in written language. This research examines language processing in heritage learners of Korean who have varying proficiencies in the two Korean scripts, Hangul and Hanja. The two scripts play an integral role in the composition of the lexicon, so the limited written proficiency of heritage learners enables us to probe a more conceptual level of the mental lexicon.
We have developed an app called Glyph that invites users to classify letters of different scripts. Through citizen science, we hope to gain a clearer idea of which shapes serve as important building blocks for the letters we see in the world's writing systems. This line of research is aimed at better understanding the space of possible shapes that letters occupy, and examine whether writing systems make efficient use of these letter shapes. We are interested in creating an empirically-grounded system of classification for letter shapes which will hopefully bring the study of letters into the fold of computational linguistics.
There is a burgeoning interest in the varieties of Korean spoken in North Korea as well as North Korean varieties spoken by diasporic migrant communities outside. We are interested in the perception of North Korean varieties to speakers of South Korean varieties, as well as potential processing differences given overt changes to the lexicon in the North as well as differences in script use. Broadly, we are also interested in building and amalgamating a set of accessible resources that will foster greater research and collaboration on the topic.