Research
The broad perspectives of my research involve
- parsing theory
- tie between grammar and parser
- electrophysiological measures (ERPs)
Specifically, I am interested in understanding the mechanisms triggering a sense of acceptability for linguistic structures that are in fact unacceptable. It's quite interesting to observe that language comprehension mechanisms fail to function perfectly in some cases given the overall sharp accuracy. Apparently there is an intricate set of operations involving the grammatical knowledge, the parser, memory systems and measurement method that have a finger in the illusion pie. Thanks to the great work of the Colin Phillips' lab we know that faster measurement methods provide inducing environments when comprehenders perceive the unacceptable as acceptable. However, more work is needed to provide evidence for the remaining factors' level of involvement. That's is exactly what I'm doing in my current research. As a case study, I am studying the processing negative polarity item (NPI) licensing dependencies which, due to their structural nature, offer various illusory platforms to investigate the degrees of interaction among the factors at play.
Please, check out our recent ERP paper.
Collaborators
Together with Seçkin Arslan, Sol Lago and Claudia Felser we ran a study on Turkish/German bilinguals and heritage speakers by using a modified design of our LCN paper. We presented the work at GALA13.
I am working with Hongchen Wu and Jun Lyu in a comparative ERP study looking at the processing profiles of the English “any” and Chinese “renhe” both of which have polarity and free choice readings.
I worked with Richard Larson on the syntax of A-not-A Questions in Turkish. Here is the manuscript.