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We are looking for people to complete our online questionnaires! If you are a native speaker of American English, or standard Russian, and are between 18 and 65 years old, you are eligible to participate. If you're interested, please email us, and we will send you a link. You can also click on the links below, to go directly to the questionnaires. Thank you!

Studies in Heritage Languages and Language Processing

What are the major cognitive constraints on the processing of language in real time? What makes one a fluent speaker of a language learned since birth? In our lab, we address these questions by studying how native speakers respond to the structure and meaning of their language. We also study the knowledge of language in heritage speakers—those who grew up hearing and even speaking a language other English but who are now more comfortable in English. According to recent statistics about one third of American college undergraduates are heritage speakers. This large demographic group has been virtually neglected until recently, but understanding what they know is crucial to our understanding of language acquisition in general.

We use behavioral methods to study native and heritage speakers of a range of languages such as English, Russian, Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, and Persian.

Announcements:

05/10/09: The next meeting will take place on Tuesday, May 12th, at 5:00pm, in Vanserg 130. Jenny Lee, from Wellesley, will be giving a talk titled Second language processing of dative and instrument prepositional-phrase attachment ambiguities: Toward an improved understanding of the argument/adjunct distinction (the abstract can be downloaded here).

04/25/09: The next meeting will take place on Tuesday, April 28th, at 5:00pm (in Vanserg 130). We will be reading a paper by Wilhelm (2008), titled Bare nouns and number in De Sułine. The discussion will be led by Ming Xiang, from Harvard.

04/22/09: The 2009 MBB Distinguished Lectures Series will continue today and tomorrow, from 4:00pm to 6:00pm, in the Yenching Auditorium. Professor Daniel Dennett will be giving two talks, titled My Body Has A Mind Of Its Own: So What Does It Need Me For?, and My Body Has A Mind Of Its Own: So What Does It Need Me For? (click here, for further details).

04/21/09: The lab meeting today will consist of Professor Daniel Dennett's MBB lecture at 4pm, titled Battles in the Brain, which will take place in the Yenching Auditorium, at 2 Divinity Ave. At 6pm, we will attend Jeanette Gundel's lecture, titled Clefts from a Cross-linguistic Perspective, in Emerson 101.

04/13/09: The next meeting will take place tomorrow (April 14th), at 6:30pm, at Professor Michael Flier's house (please email us for directions/rides). Masha Polinsky will be giving a talk about A' movement and Russian heritage speakers, titled Nothing to Lose but their Chains.

04/02/09: On April 7th, Wendy Sandler, from the University of Haifa, will be speaking about the phonological system in a new Bedouin sign language, at a meeting organized by the Language Universals Group (the abstract for the talk can be found here). The meeting will take place at 6pm, in Grays Hall 5. There will be no separate meeting in Vanserg Hall next week.

03/31/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 31st, at 5:00pm. We will be discussing talks and posters from the CUNY 2009 Conference on Human Sentence Processing (posters presented by lab members can be found here).

03/12/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 17th, at 5:00pm. Peter
Graff, from MIT, and Jacopo Romoli, from Harvard, will be presenting their CUNY topic, titled Exploring a Learning Bias against Non-Conservative Determiners (click here, to download the absract).

03/07/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 10th, at 5:15pm. We will be reading a paper by Bobaljik and Wurmbrand (2008), titled Word Order and Scope: Transparent Interfaces and the ¾ Signature, in preparation for Jonathan Bobaljik's talk on Friday (please see the events page, for more details). Peter Jenks, from Harvard, will be leading the discussion.

03/01/09: The next meeting will take place on Tuesday, March 3rd, at 5:00pm. Shukhan Ng, from CUNY, will be giving a talk on the processing of Chinese empty categories (click here, to download the abstract). Please plan to arrive on time for the meeting (feel free to email us, if you need directions to the lab).

02/25/09: The lab meetings, unless otherwise noted, will from now be held on Tuesdays, and will begin at 5:00pm, sharp. Check back soon for info about the next meeting!

02/18/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, February 24th, at 5:15pm. Cilene Rodrigues, from the University of Brasilia and Emmanuel College, will be speaking about Pirahã and Human Universals (click here to download the abstract).

02/16/09: Maria Polinsky and Suzanne Flynn are currently teaching a course at MIT, titled Looking for Generalizations in Unexpected Populations. For more information, please click here, to download the course description.

02/16/09: The next lab meeting will take place on Tuesday, February 17th, at 5:15pm. Nomi Erteschik-Shir will be giving a talk on Atom Theory and aspectual focus (please click here, to download the abstract). The background reading for the talk is chapter 5 of Information Structure: The Syntax-Discourse Interface (the reading can be downloaded here).

02/06/09: (location update!) On February 10th, William O'Grady, from the University of Hawaii, will be speaking at the joint meeting of the Polinsky Lab and the Language Universals Group. The subject of the talk will be scope transfer in Korean-English heritage (the abstract can be found here). The meeting will take place at 6pm, in Barker Center Thompson Room 110. There will be no separate meeting in Vanserg Hall that week.

01/31/09: We will have our first meeting of the semester on Tuesday, February 3rd, at 5:15pm. Nayoung Kwon will be speaking about the processing of syntactic and anaphoric gap-filler dependencies in Korean (please click here to download the abstract). We will also be discussing general issues for the upcoming semester.

Please click here to see past announcements.