About me
I am a neurolinguist and psycholinguist that specializes in syntactic processing, grammar-parser relations, language variation, language acquisition, and South Asian languages.
I am an Assistant Professor at UC Santa Cruz Linguistics. I also maintain a relationship with the University of Georgia Linguistics Lab.
I previously worked at the Neuroscience of Language Lab (NeLLab) at NYU Abu Dhabi, under Profs. Liina Pylkkänen and Alec Marantz, and as Assistant Professor in the Institute of Linguistics at University of Minnesota.
I am a co-principal investigator with Liina Pylkkänen on NSF Grant #2335767 ‘Examining syntactic and semantic computations when no order is imposed from the input.’ This project examines how the brain processes short sentences read in one fixation, instead of the usual word-by-word paradigms that we know and love. I am also a co-investigator on the SAVANT grant led by Linnaea Stockall, examining how morphological structures are processed across different language types. I co-head the Bengali/Bangla team.
Apart from linguistics, I pass my time reading, writing, doing nerd things, taking photos, playing the harp, and picking up after my cats Sniffle and Olly.
My last name is pronounced /tʃaˈkon/, please keep the <ó>. I use my first name and middle initial in citations, and he/him pronouns
Photo credit Samantha Wray.
News
December 16, 2024
My paper with Russ Simonsen is now published in Bilingualism: Language and Cognition! Check it out here!
October 31, 2024
At last, my paper with Russ Simonsen, ‘Using word order cues to predict verb class in L2 Spanish‘, has been accepted for publication at Bilingualism: Language and Cognition! In this paper, we show that native speakers and very advanced L2 learners of Spanish can use word order and case information to predict verb forms – gustan ‘like’ is more likely to occur after saludan ‘greet’ after A Juan le… ‘to John…’. The ‘wrong’ verb form causes processing difficulty in these two groups. But, earlier and intermediate learners don't predict verbs in the same way. Surprisingly, if anything, this makes language processing easier, since they never get tripped up by unpredicted verbs!
October 29, 2024
Two proofs are out! The first is a major publication lead by Dave Cayado in Cortex as part of our ESRC grant with Linnaea Stockall. This paper uses MEG to investigate the processing of morphologically complex words in Tagalog, a language with very different kinds of morphological properties than other well-studied languages. The second is a proceedings paper from the (formal) Approaches to South Asian Languages ( (f)ASAL) conference, and to appear in Journal of South Asian Languages, in which I give my thoughts on the status of cross-language neurolinguistic research, and give updates on our work in South Asian languages.
Cayado, D.K.T., Wray, S., Chacón, D.A., Lai, M. C.-H., Matar, S., Stockall, L. (2024). MEG evidence for left temporal and orbitofrontal involvement in breaking down inflected words and putting the pieces back together. Cortex. [preproof]
Chacón, D.A. (2024). It's about time!: Relating structure, the brain, and comparative syntax. Journal of South Asian Languages. [preproof]
October 28, 2024
Cheers to Society for the Neurobiology of Language for hosting us this year in Brisbane! We presented three posters. These posters are projects conducted in the University of Georgia EEG lab. Chacón et al. (2024) and Khokhar et al. (2024) are part of our ‘RPVP’ project, seeking to understand the brain's sensitivity to syntactic structure in a single glance of reading. Jordan et al. (2024) is an extension of my interest in source reconstruction with EEG – can we identify the underlying neural correlates of well-understand neural responses recorded with EEG, and how does it compare to prior findings in MEG?
Chacón, D.A., Dunagan, D.G., Jordan, T. (2024). Readers extract some grammatical information in a single fixation, across sentence structures.
Jordan, T., Dunagan, D.G., Chacón, D.A. (2024). Whisps and whispers in the brain: A crossmodal investigation into morphological decomposition.
Khokhar, H., McLendon, J., Dunagan, D.G., Jordan, T., Chacón, D.A. (2024). Quick, Don’t Move!: Wh-Movement and Wh-In-Situ Structures in Rapid Parallel Reading – EEG studies in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese.
June 18, 2024
Swarnendu Moitra is in Belgrade, Serbia presenting two talks at the International Word Processing Conference (WoProc). Both projects are collaborations with Linnaea Stockall and me, using MEG to identify earlier stages of processing Bangla morphosyntax, which uses an abugida and many opaque, fossilized Sanskritic affixes.
Moitra, S., Chacón, D.A., Stockall, L. (2024). Syntactic licensing and semantic interpretation processes occur in parallel in complex word recognition in abugidas.
Moitra, S., Chacón, D.A., Stockall, L. (2024). Tracing word length in non-alphabetic orthographies. (See our PLoS One paper on this topic!)