Dr Aine Ito – Assistant Professor
My research focuses on prediction during language comprehension and non-native language processing. Language comprehension in a native language is very efficient. While speakers can easily produce 2-5 words per second, native listeners typically have no conscious difficulty in keeping up with the speech and understanding the meaning of the speech.
But such real-time comprehension can be difficult for non-native speakers. Even if they have sufficient vocabulary and a good grammatical knowledge, they may fail to comprehend sentences as efficiently as native speakers do.
My research investigates what makes it difficult to comprehend a non-native language efficiently and explores ways to facilitate non-native language processing with a focus on predictive processing. I am also interested in how orthographic information influences listening comprehension. I mainly use eye-tracking (visual world paradigm), EEG and reaction time measures in my experiments.
Dr Hui-Ching Chen – Postdoctoral Fellow
I am a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of English, Linguistics and Theatre Studies at National University of Singapore and working on the Language Prediction Project with Dr. Aine Ito. The aim of the project is to understand to what extent L1 and L2 speakers process language by using the eye-tracking method. My research interest is in understanding how human beings acquire language across life span and across different language groups and how language ability interacts with other cognitive ability.
Dr Nick Huang – Assistant Professor
I am a linguist interested in understanding the relation between linguistic experience, sentence processing, and grammars and what that relation might mean for our theories of language and the mind. More specifically, I’m interested in questions like:
- How do children make use of what is spoken around them to figure out the rules of their native languages?
- How do adults apply these rules in production and comprehension?
- But a more basic question: what are these rules? And what are the facts like for production and comprehension?
On a day-to-day basis, I (and my collaborators) develop more precise descriptions of linguistic knowledge and behaviour (Question 3), often taking a cross-linguistic perspective and formal experiments. Addressing this question sets the stage for addressing Questions 1 and 2, which we tackle with a combination of corpus analyses, computational models, and experiments.
Current projects of mine focus on the grammar of abstract words for belief and thoughts and abstract word order rules, both of which can be challenging for young children to learn. I also maintain an active interest in dialectal variation and language contact, especially Singlish.
Dr Serene Siow – Postdoctoral Fellow
I am a postdoctoral research fellow working with Dr Nick Huang. I am interested in how young bilinguals learn their two languages in the weird and wonderful world of mixed languages they live in.
My current research is focused on how abstract words for beliefs and thoughts are learnt. In addition to being difficult to observe in the world, abstract words are often polysemous, which means that they have several meanings and usages. For example, the word “know” can refer to recognising (“I know that person”) and understanding (“I know what you mean”), among other meanings. Particularly, I am looking at whether knowing two languages affect how these abstract words with many meanings are learnt and used.
Dr Zheng Shen – Assistant Professor
I work toward understanding human linguistic capacities, the abilities to generate and comprehend natural sentences and reject unnatural ones. Simply put, I try to find out what we know when we speak a language and how we use that knowledge.
In seeking the answers to that, I work with speakers of English, Singlish, Chinese, German, and Slavic languages using experimental methods: giving speakers different kinds of sentences to rate, read, and produce, and see how they react.
My current projects focus on noun phrases, conjunction, and subject-verb agreement.
Dr Myung Hye Yoo – Postdoctoral Fellow
I am a postdoctoral research fellow working with Dr Zheng Shen on the processing of closed conjunction agreements. My research mainly focuses on how semantic or syntactic information interacts with processing mechanisms by examining complex structures involving long-distance dependencies.