Emma Nguyen

Researcher

Linguistics

I am a fifth-year doctoral student in Linguistics and IGERT fellow. My research interests include syntax/semantics processing in children and adults. I also sometimes dabble in theoretical semantics, namely degree semantics.

The goal of my current research in SynLab is to leverage P600 satiation in ERP-based studies to test syntactic theories. My previous research has shown that satiation does not occur when there are multiple violations that are categorically distinct from each other at both a grammatical and sentence processing level. The next step is to test violations that are distinct at a grammatical level, but are similar at the level of sentence processing (both first-pass dynamics and reanalysis). By holding sentence processing properties constant, we can ask how similar violations must be at a grammatical level to induce satiation.

If successful, I want to explore the possibility of extending this satiation paradigm beyond syntactic theory. A number of studies have shown P600 effects in the semantic and pragmatic domain. If P600 satiation can be used as a new level of classification in syntax, it may be possible to do something similar in semantics and pragmatics. The hope in the end is to expand the empirical base of both syntax and semantics/pragmatics, and to help grow the use of EEG in these “theoretical” fields.