The perception of lexical tones (with Ratree Wayland)

Languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Thai and Yoruba use differences in pitch and pitch contours to distinguish among lexical meaning. Drs. Wayland and Kaan are currently using ERPs to determine:

Whether listeners unfamiliar with Thai can distinguish among Thai tones at a 'pre-attentional' level measured by ERPs
What the effect is of laboratory training on perception at this level
Whether there are differences depending on language background (that is, speaking a tone language different from Thai, versus not speaking a tone language)

Transfer in second language processing (with Frank Wijnen, Utrecht university)

When you know more than one language, you'd need to be sure that you speak or process the language being used at a particular point. This implies that you would need to actively inhibit the other language. Our current project investigates the amount of interference from the native language when reading sentences in the second language. In particular, we look at Dutch second language speakers of English. In addition, we aim to determine what cognitive factors correlate with the amount of interference observed. Click here for the project website.

The interpretation of quantifiers

Quantifiers are words like ‘most’, ‘few’ and ‘three’ that denote quantities. These small words also affect the way we interpret things, e.g. ‘This product is 90% fat-free’ sounds much more appealing than ‘This product contains 10% fat’ (See e.g. Moxey & Sanford, Applied Psychology 2000). In addition, these words also give instructions to reader as to how to relate the current sentence to the previous context. For instance, in ‘Three people were holding umbrellas. Most were running for shelter,’ ‘most’ is unlikely to refer to the three people just mentioned, but instead leads to the inference of a larger group of people. We are interested in a model of how quantifier expression are being processed during reading, in particular:

When during processing is a particular interpretation assigned to the quantified expression
What factors influence the interpretation?
What is the response in the ERPs?
Which brain areas are involved in processing quantified expressions.

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