This Postdoctoral Research Fellowship supports the career development of a recent Ph.D. graduate from the University of California, Berkeley in the field of Linguistics. The research is supervised by two professors from the Center for Language Science at the Pennsylvania State University. This interdisciplinary research project is an important step toward understanding the commonalities and differences between monolingual and multilingual language processing. Bilingualism has historically been treated as its own separate field, but the current study contributes a unique set of data that can be exploited to better understand the cognitive resources that underlie all language processing. A better understanding of bilingual/multilingual linguistic norms is critical for the development of effective teaching curricula and assessments. In addition, the results of this work have the potential to be useful for diagnostic and treatment materials in a clinical setting.
This research incorporates methods from phonetics, corpus linguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to better understand the time course of processes underlying speech production and speech perception. The project uses bilingual language processing as a context that can reveal cognitive mechanisms that are otherwise hidden in monolingual speakers. The specific research questions target the interplay between the neural signature of inhibitory processes, as revealed using Event Related Potentials (ERPs), and the behavioral outcome of that inhibition, as revealed in acoustic measures of speech articulation. The studies take advantage of bilinguals' ability to switch languages mid-sentence. The training component of this project is both theoretical and methodological. The project capitalizes on the Fellow's previous training while simultaneously familiarizing her with the theoretical background necessary to conduct research related to the cognitive psychology of bilingualism, and the methodological training necessary to incorporate neurocognitive and eyetracking methods into her future work. The intellectual merit of the proposed research is its ability to tie together findings from traditionally separate approaches to studying language.
