News

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!)

June 1, 2024

• My NSF grant with Liina Pylkkänen was funded! The title is ‘Examining syntactic and semantic computations when no order is imposed from the input’. We've grown accustomed to thinking about language processing as a phenomenon that happens word by word. But, what happens when you glance down at your cell phone to check a text notification, and you don't have time to carefully plan and execute saccades? What happens if you read a language like Greenlandic, where a ‘word’ can outspan a single fixation point, or a language like Chinese where a single fixation can encompass multiple words?

  My role in this is to help psycholinguistic theory divorce itself from equating ‘incremental processing’ with the grammatical category of ‘word’. Put differently: we know a lot about how the brain processes words given prior syntactic contexts, but how does the brain respond to sentences? In collaboration with Pylkkänen's group, we are conducting experiments in a variety of languages to identify how the brain responds to short sentences presented in a single fixation, in EEG and MEG. What matters to the earliest stages of processing? We currently have 4 under-review manuscripts (with many more on the way!):

  • Dunagan et al. (2024) – ‘Rapid visual form-based processing of (some) grammatical features in parallel reading: An EEG study in English’. EEG responses in English do not distinguish between grammatical and ungrammatical number agreement (‘the dog chases a ball’ vs. ‘the dog chase a ball’) for sentences displayed for 200ms, but they do distinguish between singular and plural NPs. Surprisal values of words in the center of the screen (‘chase’) exhibit early neural responses, but words further in the periphery show more effuse and later responses (‘ball’), suggestive of parallel processing centered on the fovea but later integration of parafoveal information. We suggest in this paper that reading short sentences is not unlike reading complex words – functional items (‘the’, ‘-er’, ‘-s’) scaffold a syntactic form first, followed by interpreting the lexical material (‘dog’, ‘chase’).

  • Chacón et al. (2024) – ‘Quick, Don’t Move!: Wh-Movement and Wh-In-Situ Structures in Rapid Parallel Reading – EEG studies in English, Urdu, and Mandarin Chinese‘. EEG responses to short sentences with wh-elements elicit activity in right posterior or anterior/midline sensors in wh-movement languages (English) and wh-in-situ languages (Urdu, Mandarin Chinese). Is there a universal ‘wh’ response abstracted away from superficial details? Well, it's complicated.

  • Flower & Pylkkänen (2024) – ‘The spatiotemporal dynamics of bottom-up and top-down processing during at-a-glance reading’. MEG responses localized in the left language network distinguish between grammatical sentences (‘all cats are nice') and reversed, ungrammatical sentences (‘nice are cats all’), but not 1-word transpositions (‘all are cats nice’). Later activity in the left language network does grammatical sentences from transposed ones Frequency effects of bigrams surface around the same early time window, suggestive of parallel reading.

  • Krogh & Pylkkänen (2024) – ‘Manipulating syntax without taxing working memory: MEG correlates of syntactic dependencies in a Verb-Second language’. Danish represents the unaccusative/unergative distinction by raising a verb into a higher projection, and also creates polar questions by moving the verb to the left edge of the clause. MEG responses show an earlier response to the unaccusative/unergative distinction, followed by a later response to the polar question. This suggests a mapping between the order of transformations and the MEG signal.