Biography:
Chris is a PhD student in Spanish and Language Science. He holds an M.A. in Spanish and two B.S. degrees in Spanish and Biology from the Pennsylvania State University. His research interests include child language acquisition and sociolinguistic variation across the lifespan. He has worked in Dr. Karen Miller's Language Acquisition Lab investigating the acquisition of syntactic variation in Spanish speaking children in the Dominican Republic. Chris will travel to Granada, Spain to work with Dr. Teresa Bajo on an eye-tracking study investigating how adult native Spanish speakers process different referential devices (e.g., full Noun Phrases, subject pronouns, etc.) based on preceding discourse in their native language. While Spanish demonstrates subject drop (i.e. a null subject) in cases of salient/known referents, English requires the use of subjects regardless of the status of the referent within the discourse. Therefore bilingual Spanish/English speakers will be tested to gauge what impact the acquisition of a non-null subject language (i.e. English) has on a speakers' processing of pragmatically constrained syntax in a null subject language.