Two weeks ago I attended the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Austin, TX. There were several interesting talks and some really great keynotes. I gave two presentations. One was a talk on second-language influence on first-language sentence comprehension that was part of a session on language processing and acquisition (pictured). I presented some of my electrophysiology results and discussed how the results might lead to models of bilingual syntactic representation. We had a great audience for the session with insightful questions. I’m happy to see the interest in bilingual language processing at this meeting.
The other presentation I gave was a poster on non-native phonemic perception. We looked at allophonic pairs in Spanish that are contrastive in English. Since these allophones have different phonotactic constraints in Spanish, we asked whether those constraints influence the ability to perceive the phonemic pair contrastively in their non-native language, English. If you want to see the poster, head over to my publications page and click on the poster title to download it!
Eve Higby 