Congratulations to Qi Cheng and Sharon Hargus on receiving the Royalty Research Fund awards, and to Naja Ferjan Ramírezqi and Richard Wright on receiving Linguistic Fund awards!
Naja Ferjan Ramírez’s project ‘Linking infant attention to speech with language experience: A novel eye-tracking study with infants in same-sex families’ will examine the contributions of parental input in families headed by same-sex couples and the ways in which this input shapes infants’ attentional responses to language and their language abilities.
Sharon Hargus’ project ‘Northwest Sahaptin Text Dissemination’ will result in a website to
disseminate transcriptions, translations and word glosses of over 53
hours of narrative recordings in Northwest Sahaptin, an endangered Native American language
of Washington state.
Qi Cheng’s project (with Tian Zhao-Drinic from Speech and Hearing Sciences) 'How does early language experience shape pre-attentive visual processing for sign languages? Examining visual mismatch responses in American Sign Language using Magnetoencephalography (MEG)' will explore the neural responses by ASL signers when they perceive linguistically relevant visual changes in their peripheral vision while not paying direct attention. The goal of the project is to examine the role of early sign language experience on automatic lexical processing in ASL among deaf and hearing signers.
Richard Wright’s project ‘Interactions of higher-level prosodic and intonational structure with speech style’ (in collaboration with colleagues at the Université de Paris 7, (CLILLAC-ARP)) will examine how intonational and prosodic structure interact with speech style in English and French. It will also model the interaction of discourse structure and context with speaking tasks with the aim of building a speech style classifier for the two languages.