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| Suzanne Department of Linguistics Suzanne.Dikker @ nyu.edu Fifth-year PhD student Dikker | LingLinks[ CV ]Neurolinguistics Lab Language Analysis Linguist List Ethnologue Kennislink LinksLing |
Research Interests |
How is it possible that it takes the brain only half a second to fully analyze the word solved in a sentence like the puzzle was solved?
In my research I investigate the nature of the neural mechanisms that enable such efficient language processing.
Using MEG, we (Hugh Rabagliati,
Liina Pylkkänen, and myself) recently found that visual cortex shows sensitivity to linguistic manipulations as early as ~100ms (evidenced by increased activity at the visual M100 component, the first salient response to visual stimulation in MEG, for an unexpected syntactic category like the puzzle was in the solved). This finding was striking in two respects: (a) left-anterior and -temporal regions, and not visual areas, are typically implicated in syntactic composition, and (b) the visual M100 reponse typically only shows sensitivity to low-level visual factors, such as stimulus noise and size, not even distinguishing between letter strings and symbols for words in isolation. Read our recent paper in Cognition if you are curious about the details.
How can early sensory processing be affected by high-level linguistic factors such as syntactic category?
We hypothesize that this very early effect makes most sense if you explain it in the context of structural anticipation.
When we read or listen our brains are very proactive, continuously estimating what might come next. The neural correlates of this proactive processing might take the form of top-down modulation of visual cortex. Under such a hypothesis, visual cortex does not perform linguistic analysis: rather, the effect arises from the violation of category predictions that have been priorly 'translated' into visual form correlates.
This hypothesis raises (at least) two questions:
My current research aims to answer these questions, possibly expanding to non-linguistic contexts in the future.
In previous work, I have focused on how language contact and bilingualism can inform linguistic theory.
For example, I have studied
Lastly, and not least importantly, I try to contribute to society at large a bit, mainly in the context of language analysis,
which is used by a number of governments as a method to determine asylum seekers' origin. Read more here (Guidelines)
and here (de Taalstudio).
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