This award supports the PI and students from University of Arizona in a collaboration with Thomas Pechmann of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Through the collaboration, the researchers will study the activation of syntactic word class information while speakers access their mental lexicon. The international collaboration combines the expertise of the US side in speech error analysis with the expertise of the German side in the use of experimental picture naming tasks. Cross-language comparisons made possible by the collaboration will use language specific variation in the expression of syntactic parameters and will greatly assist in distinguishing constraints on lexical processing indexed by the experimental procedures. The work will have many behavioral, computational, and formal reflexes that may be interpreted in the context of lexical access mechanisms.
The project also advances international human resources through the participation of graduate students and post-doctoral fellows, thereby contributing to the development of a globally engaged work force. The scientific aspects of the collaborative work will be highly valuable for the broad education of the PhD students on both sides of the Atlantic and will strengthen the research efforts of both groups.
