KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Dr. Zuzanna Fuchs
Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California and the director of the Psycholinguistics of Mono- and Multilingualism Lab at USC. Her research focuses on noun categorization systems, including grammatical gender, animacy, and noun classes. She uses formal and psycholinguistic methods to understand how noun category information is represented in the grammar, stored in the mental lexicon, and accessed during real-time agreement processing. Her research targets both monolingual and bilingual speakers (especially heritage speakers) of languages with noun categorization systems.
Talk:
"Heritage languages & language processing: How New Methods Shed Light on the Topic of Grammatical Gender."
Traditional methods of investigating heritage language competence seemed to agree: a common characteristic of heritage speakers is that their production and comprehension of grammatical gender differentiates them from monolingual baseline speakers. But recent work employing measures of real-time language processing seems to have come to a consensus in the opposite direction: heritage speakers' processing of grammatical gender is remarkably similar to that of monolingual baseline groups. This talk will highlight the contributions of research on heritage language processing of grammatical gender toward a more enriched understanding of heritage language competence, also exploring new data pertaining to individual differences between heritage speakers.