Rhonda McClain

Biography:

I am currently a fourth-year student in the Psychology department at Penn State and I work with Dr. Judith F. Kroll. Currently, I am working on projects investigating whether asymmetries exist for the first and second languages with respect to their reliance on conceptual for the sake of spoken translation. Recently, I have become interested in whether learners exploit intuitions about semantic /conceptual features when acquiring the grammatical categories of gender and aspect in their second language and whether these intuitions may serve as cues that bias their responses in L2 processing. The goal of my PIRE research project is to use behavioral and event-related potential techniques to determine whether very early English-speaking learners and English monolinguals tend to use semantic features in deriving gender and aspect information in an L2 or unknown language (for the monolinguals) and whether this changes with proficiency and the development of metalinguistic knowledge. Outside of research, I really enjoy to cook, I occasionally make earrings at home, I love to jog and practice Pilates, and I'm obsessed with my Miniature Schnauzer puppy named Grover.