Dr. Claudia Felser - Research Statement
I have always been fascinated by our ability to create an unlimited number of meaningful phrases and sentences from a limited vocabulary. Syntactic structures are not generated randomly, of course, and modern linguistics provides us with descriptive tools and theoretical frameworks that allow us to uncover the principles that constrain human grammar(s).
For my PhD I investigated grammar from a theoretical perspective, but I later became more interested in the relationship between grammatical knowledge and language use. In my research I seek to build bridges between theoretical syntax and real-time sentence processing, between sentence processing and acquisition, and between sentence processing and syntactic change.
One major research focus of mine has been on sentence processing in language learners, in particular non-native (L2) speakers. As grammatical processing ability and acquisition are closely intertwined, theories and models of language acquisition ought to include assumptions about learners' real-time processing of the input. At the same time, data from L2 speakers (and other 'non-standard' populations) may provide useful test cases for current psycholinguistic models of language processing, which have traditionally been informed primarily by data from adult L1 speakers.
My second research focus lies on experimental syntax. Gathering acceptability judgements or language processing data in controlled experimental settings can help empirically support - or may challenge - assumptions made in the descriptive or theoretical linguistic literature. Experimental psycholinguistics provides us with a range of methods suitable for investigating what role grammatical categories and constraints posited within formal linguistic theory play in real-time language processing. Although processing data may not be able to adjudicate between different grammatical formalisms or frameworks, using processing tasks can reveal evidence of grammatical operations that are not open to direct observation.
I believe that just as much as language processing research benefits from linguistic informedness, linguistic theorizing should aim to develop models that are at least compatible with what we know about the workings of the human language processing system.