Overview

Overview

Within the broad field of psycholinguistics and language acquisition, we have a range of ongoing research projects, representing the variety of interests of psycholinguistics staff within the Department. Current and planned projects include:

• Applications of second language acquisition research to language teaching practice (Heather Marsden)
• Cross-linguistic investigation of knowledge of existential quantifiers (e.g., any) in first and second language acquisition (Heather Marsden)
• Cross-linguistic and experimental investigation of the psychological significance of ‘templates’, or early phonological patterns (Marilyn Vihman and Tamar Keren-Portnoy)
• Experimental investigation of the role of children’s names and of the effect of isolated words and final position in the input utterances on early phonological learning (Marilyn Vihman and Tamar Keren-Portnoy)
• Experimental investigation of the effect of speech production on memory for newly learned word in adults (Tamar Keren-Portnoy and Eytan Zweig) 
• Knowledge of syntax in Serbian-speaking Broca’s aphasics (Helen Goodluck)
• Processing of  syntax in Akan (spoken in Ghana) (Helen Goodluck)
• Knowledge of complex syntax in persons with Down Syndrome (Helen Goodluck)
• A neurolinguistic investigation into the processing of scalar implicatures (Eytan Zweig)

For more details of any of these projects, see the individual staff member’s profile pages.

In addition to specific research projects, a number of reading and discussion groups related to language acquisition and psycholinguistics meet throughout the year. Recent groups have included a second language acquisition group, a second language phonology group, and a phonological development group. We also have active links, including reading groups, with researchers at Leeds and Sheffield. Occasional meetings of two inter-university groups, the North East Language Acquisition Group (NELAG) and the White Rose Acquisition of Language Forum are also held.

Members

Members

Corpora

Corpora

• The York Corpus of Child French, which consists of data from three young French-speaking children from different areas of the French speaking world, Canada, Belgium and France.