Curriculum Vitae (Updated September 23, 2018)
Hiya!
I am a sixth year Doctoral Student in Linguistics at the University of Connecticut.
My dissertation work focuses on the role of evidence, or the language input which must be processed to develop language competence, in the acquisition of complex syntactic structures.
- How might we characterize and quantify evidence?
- What kind of evidence is needed to learn which verbs participate in any given complex syntactic structure (e.g. passives, double-object constructions, etc.).
- Are there smaller units of structure/meaning that may also serve to be informative for children in such a learning task?
Specifically, I am looking at frequency and lexical semantic features closely in order to investigate the extent of their impact on children’s acquisition of the English verbal passive.
Sometimes I moonlight as a neurolinguist. My research in this area focuses on leveraging experimental methods to explore syntactic theory. Specifically, I aim to understand the dynamics of P600 satiation in order to discover the spectrum of syntactic constraints that can/cannot satiate each others’ P600.
I also have some dabblings in acquisition of semantics and theoretical semantics work.
Click through to learn more about me and my work!
(Last updated: November 6, 2018)
[UPCOMING PRESENTATIONS]
Nguyen, E., & Sprouse, J. (upcoming, January). ERP satiation of whether-islands impacts scalp distribution, not amplitude. Talk at The 93nd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. New York City, NY. January 3-6, 2019.
Nguyen, E., & Pearl, L. (2018). Using developmental modeling to specify learning and representation of the passive in English children. Poster at the 42nd Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston University, Boston. [PDF]
