Facilitative use of grammatical gender We are running a number of eye-tracking studies to investigate asymmetries in how monolingual and heritage speakers of languages with grammatical gender (specifically Spanish and Polish) use gender information on pre-nominal elements to facilitate lexical access of subsequent nouns. In follow-up studies to those in Fuchs (2019), we manipulate the type of gender-carrying element (ex. quantifiers vs adjectives) to determine what affects heritage speakers' ability to process grammatical gender at the same speed as monolingual speakers, and how this informs our theories regarding the structure of the nominal phrase.
Growing (Bilingual) Words We are excited to announce a collaboration with the Growing Words Project at the University of Iowa! This is a longitudinal study that will investigate the unfolding of language learning in bilingual children who spent the first few years of their lives speaking predominantly a language other than English, from the time when they enter the US school system. We ask how their knowledge of English develops over time, and what happens to their ability to process their heritage language as the amount of input to their English grammar and their heritage grammar shifts drastically during school years.