Research InterestsLearning another language to communicate with others in the world is a useful skill that adults seem to have great difficulty in acquiring. Most of my research interests stem from the paradoxical observation that adults are very experienced learners, yet still struggle to learn new languages. Using what we know about proficient bilinguals, learning, and memory, I'm interested in answering the who, what, where, when, why, and how of what makes learning new languages as an adult so hard. My past and current projects have started to answer these by looking at the who, where, why.
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I use both behavioral and neuroscience methods to investigate questions of the adult language learner. The temporal sensitivity of EEGs allow us to examine language processing and learning at the millisecond timescale, and EEGs also reveal changes in these processes before overt behavioral measures.
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• Most often, adults learn a new language by connecting it to what they know in their native language
• The native language plays important support roles during the acquisition of another language, but must also change and adapt to accommodate it • We tested the hypothesis that these changes can be detected in early stages of language learning, and that some learners are more accommodating than others |
• Studying abroad seems to be an easier context to learn another language
• Many adults travel or live in places where many languages are spoken, despite not speaking those languages themselves • Does exposure to other languages, without any intention to learn them, create incidental learning of those languages and subsequent learning faster? |
• Some adults seem to have an easier time learning new languages than others
• Language processing and learning relies heavily on domain-general learning processes and resources • A lifetime of relying on different domain-general learning processes might shape the way individual learners recruit those for learning a new language, resulting in the variable success rates in adult language learning |