Our lab uses a range of behavioral and psycholinguistic methods to explore the nature of acquisition and processing in adult second language learners. Our research examines the linguistic and cognitive factors that influence acquisition at varying stages of development, from the initial state to very advanced levels of proficiency.
Our recent work takes a careful look at individual differences in sentence processing in both L2 learners and native speakers, examining whether the skills that underlie L1 and L2 processing are fundamentally similar or different.
Projects in the lab have examine a range of topics including aspects of morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse. These topics have been investigated in a range of languages including Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. Student and faculty-led projects have been funded by a range of sources including the National Science Foundation, Language Learning, and the William Orr Dingwall Foundation. Several of our projects are collaborative efforts with the Neurolinguistics and Language Processing Laboratory, which is located right next door and houses an EEG laboratory. KU offers a great, collaborative environment to explore topics in the cognitive neuroscience of second language acquisition. Faculty mentors work very closely with graduate students and encourage students to present and publish their work and seek external funding.
The laboratory, located in Room 4035 of the Dole Human Development Center, consists of three adjacent rooms, two of which are dedicated testing rooms for psycholinguistic studies. There are also three dedicated workstations equipped with software for statistical analysis. All of our psycholinguistic experiments are run with Paradigm by Perception Research Systems, Inc.