MATT WAGERS and SANDY CHUNG RECEIVE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION GRANT

Matt Wagers and Sandy Chung received a three-year award from the National Science Foundation to support the Chamorro Psycholinguistics Project. This will support the development of the existing work they’ve done on culturally-sensitive, field-appropriate methods for investigating the psycholinguistics of understudied languages. (This includes this earlier NSF White Paper in collaboration with Pranav Anand). It builds on their completed study on the comprehension of WH-agreement. The project is conducted with their colleague Manuel Borja, a native speaker-educator from Saipan, and they hope to involve local Chamorro students in research internships. In the coming years, Matt and Sandy will be looking at how lexical vs. syntactic sources of information guide grammatical dependency formation, the relation between positive and negative evidence in comprehension, and at ways of documenting microvariation in agreement paradigms, argument ordering and clause combination. For more information see this article.