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Research

Dissertation Project: Intervention and Inference in Native and L2 Spanish

Previous work has found processing costs in long-distance dependencies containing intervening noun phrases, such as object extracted relative clauses. Two approaches to intervention, Featural Relativized Minimality, and Similarity Based Interference, make similar predictions about how intervention leads to processing difficulty. However, the two accounts differ in (1) the predictions they make about structure and (2) the types of linguistic information they predict will lead to intervention or interference effects. 

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My ongoing dissertation work investigates predictions of Featural Relativized Minimality and Similarity Based Interference in native and L2 Spanish speakers. Specifically, we compare structural intervention to linear interference and explore the contributions of morphosyntactic and semantic feature similarity to intervention/interference effects.