MINORITY PREDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP

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Research for a dissertation topic will take place during the third year of graduate studies, in order to advance to candidacy by the end of the fourth year. The general goal under this fellowship lies in mastering the research techniques for behavioral and event related brain potential (ERP) studies in psycholinguistics. These techniques will allow for investigation into the relationship between language and general cognitive processes, and for an understanding of their underlying neurological structures. The particular focus is on multilingual populations, with the aim of understanding how they differ from monolingual on memory capacity for language, learning and development, the distribution of cognitive resources and the reconciliation of linguistic strategies. There is a long-term gaol of understanding the development of language-related skills in children, and the corresponding development of brain structures and neural processes. Moreover, interest lies in the maintenance, improvement and adaption of these skills over a life-time in both normal and abnormal language growth, as well as the loss of these skills due to neurological insult and aging. The immediate goal of this research proposal is to examine the role of morphological gender in semantic processing of a sentential context. The results of this study can impact our understanding of the relationship between semantic and syntactic information in language processing. Furthermore, it could have theoretical implications for the nature of the processing-breakdown in anomic populations. The relationship between a word-form and the meaning of that word is unclear. However, accessing gender information for a particular word is closely linked to the word-form itself. If gender-marking can assist in the semantic unfolding of an utterance, then perhaps gender-cues can provide a clue as to the point at which the ability to name an object dissociates from the ability to recognize it. The use of psycholinguistic measures of comprehension and performance, such as reaction-time studies with auditory sentence-stimuli in real-time presentation, will provide information about the role of gender cues in both semantic and syntactic processing of a sentence. ERPs will provide information about the neurological time-course of these processes, by indicating, through brain potentials such as the N400, at which point the information provided by gender-marked words influences the meaning of an utterance. Finally, whether gender maintains its effect in semantic processing in bilinguals (e.g. Spanish/English) will be examined.