Faculty
Alan Beretta - Lab DirectorAlan's research has broadly examined linguistic representations and their neural implementation and online processing. The current lab focus is on compounds. The principal questions we are addressing concern the roles of modifiers and heads in constituent integration when compounds occur in sentences in real time, as evidenced in event-related potentials and behavioral measures. The goal is to arrive at better models of incremental compound processing.
Personal Webpage Karthik DurvasulaKarthik is an assistant professor who specializes in phonology and phonetics. Recently, he has attempted to probe linking hypotheses between phono-logical/phonetic representations and neurophysiological signatures, especially concentrating on concepts such as categorical/featural representations, and under- specification.
Personal Webpage Heather TaylorHeather specializes in syntactic theory and syntactic analysis. Her research focuses on how morphosyntactic objects are represented in the mind, and how big or small they can be (or, simply, “do syntactic constructions exist as primary building blocks in the mind?”). Her research and teaching include topics in cognitive science and psychology. In the lab, she is the “in-house syntactian”, and is currently participating in experiments on agreement and prediction.
Personal Webpage StudentsJoe JalbertJoe just recently graduated with his PhD in Linguistics from MSU. His research interests are in theoretical syntax and sentence processing, specifically looking at reflexives and reference. His research centered on the processing of anaphoric and logophoric reflexives and head reanalysis in German compounds. He is now a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Iceland in Reykjavik, Iceland, working alongside our collaborator, Matthew Whelpton.
Personal Webpage Monica NesbittMonica is a graduate student in linguistics. Her research interests are in phonetics and phonology, specifically probing social and cognitive effects on speech perception and production. Currently, she is investigating the neurophysiological signatures of prosody during compound processing.
Kaylin SmithKaylin is a fourth-year PhD student in Linguistics. She is interested in incremental language processing in EEG. She has been involved in research which focuses on processing of measure phrase-headed compounds in Icelandic in EEG, the online processing of compound versus phrasal stress in English, and determining whether certain semantic anomalies robustly override unambiguously good syntax and cause the parser to interpret the sentence as syntactically illicit.
Personal Webpage Drew TrotterDrew is a doctoral candidate in Linguistics, working in speech perception and phonology, especially the acquisition and perception of L2 phonology. Recently, he has been using EEG to study phonological representations and categorical perception.
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