New Psycholinguistics Research

Cecile De Cat (School of Modern Languages and Cultures, Linguistics and Phonetics) has been awarded Faculty of Arts pump-priming funds for a collaborative pilot study into language processing.

Together with Ekaterini Klepousniotou (Institute of Psychological Sciences, Language and Cognitive Neuroscience), De Cat will conduct an electro-encephalography experiment on the processing of noun-noun compounds by second language speakers of English.

This project will exploit recent advances in brain science to explain intriguing differences recently discovered between very advanced learners of English, depending on their mother-tongue.

The study will focus on the acquisition of English noun-noun compounds (such as car key or mountain rescue). A preliminary study has revealed that learners whose mother-tongue has a different word-order in compounds process English compounds much more slowly than those whose mother-tongue has the same word order as English. Using Event Related Potentials methodology, we will seek to identify the cause of this slower processing.