Interview with Professor Dustin Chacón

The Department welcomed a new faculty member this fall, Professor Dustin Chacón, a psycholinguist whose research investigates sentence processing and language acquisition, using neurolinguistic methods (including EEG) with a special emphasis on languages of South Asia.

Now that the academic year has started, the WHASC Editor got the chance to ask Dustin a few questions about his career and research.

How did you get into linguistics?

As cliché as it sounds, I always had some interest in language, and I can’t point to any one particular moment when I decided to become a linguist. Sometime in high school I started learning Japanese and Bengali, but this was sparked by my interest in video games and wanting to gossip in secret with my Bangladeshi-American friends at lunch. But, at some point, I made some friends online who were interested in language and Linguistics (at least two of whom are also professional linguists and friends today). And, I have dim memories of conducting a study in a local kindergarten testing the mutual exclusivity bias in language acquisition for my regional science fair (I did not win). Despite all of this, it wasn’t until I arrived at my undergraduate institution University of Minnesota and took my Introduction to Linguistics class that I actually had any idea what Linguistics even was, or what a career in Linguistics could be. But, suffice to say, I was more than eager to be a student. The rest is history!

What is a project that you are currently working on?

I have an NSF grant with Liina Pylkkänen at NYU investigating the ‘sentence superiority effect’. A number of studies have shown that short sentences (3-5 words long) displayed very quickly, in one glance (200ms) are recalled more accurately than word lists or ungrammatical sentences. This could suggest that there’s some sense in which we can process sentences without necessarily reading them word-by-word, as is commonly assumed in both psycholinguistic theory and methods. But, how does this work? Thinking through this problem really requires us to rethink the relationship between how stimuli are displayed, properties of the visual system, and ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ psycholinguistic mechanisms. In our collaboration, we measure the neural responses during this 200ms glance using electro- and magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG), and identify a few factors that this neural sentence superiority effect is (and isn’t!) sensitive to. This paradigm can be leveraged to explore lots of different questions about how the brain processes and represents aspects of sentence structure, especially when conducted in parallel to traditional experiment designs. It also challenges us to think more carefully about the psychology of reading and how it relates to the brain’s detection of grammatical structure in words and phrases more generally.

What is a big question in your subdiscipline that excites you, and why?

A long-standing mystery in the cognitive neuroscience of language is whether there are any regions of the brain or patterns of brain activity that specifically correspond to syntax, distinct from compositional semantics, lexical meaning, or morphology. This is motivated by both classic questions about modularity of the mind and why only humans have language as we know it. A few key areas have been identified and studied extensively, but we are still wrapping our heads around the findings as a field. I’m interested in this question because I’m generally interested in syntax and in the brain. But, even more than that, I think there is potential for gaining a deeper understanding of language in the brain. When we study ‘syntax’ in the brain, are we interested in syntactic processes (Merge, Agree), syntactic representations (morphosyntactic features), kinds of phenomena (agreement, movement, case), or computations involved in sentence processing (memory retrieval, prediction)? When we study syntax in the ‘brain’, should the theories be stated at the level of major brain regions (left inferior frontal gyrus, posterior temporal lobe), or distributed patterns of neural activity over time and space? How similar or different is ‘syntax in the brain’ in different languages, exactly? There’s still a lot that we don’t know, and I think we’ll make the most progress with careful consideration of what we’ve learned in linguistic theory and psycholinguistics, and there’s lots of room for creativity in experiment design and theorizing.

What is the most interesting thing you have seen/done/learned about in Santa Cruz so far?

The most exciting thing has been building our new EEG lab space! But perhaps the most interesting thing was the Santa Cruz Ghost Tour, in which I learned which rides and attractions on the Boardwalk are haunted, and our resident ghost pirate ship. I can’t say that I’ve seen any ghosts recently myself, but now I know where to watch out for them!

Welcome to the Department, Dustin!