Y.H. Khoe (Yung Han) MA

People who speak more than one language make up at least half of the world’s population. Multilingualism was traditionally understudied in psycholinguistics, but is receiving increased attention. However, the details of how different languages interact in the mind are not yet well understood. One reason for this is that multilinguals differ from one another in how they have learned their different languages, and how they use those languages in their daily lives. In my PhD project, I will investigate how the grammars of different languages are represented and processed, and how this depends on the diverse multilingual experience. I will do this using computational modeling, a fruitful research method that is underused in research on bilinguals. In both monolingual and bilingual research into syntactic processing, behavioral research that is based on so-called structural priming, which is the tendency to reuse syntactic structures that have recently been heard, has led to important insights into the language system. In the monolingual domain, investigation of experimental results using computational modeling has resulted in greater understanding of the underlying mechanisms. In the bilingual domain, however, computational modeling of structural priming is challenging. I will therefore implement a model of cross-language structural priming to investigate how the individual multilingual experience shapes a speaker’s language system. Furthermore, I will extend the model to include more than two languages.

• Computational Psycholinguistics

• Grammar & Cognition; Cognitive and Developmental aspects of Multilingualism