22 December: fyi -- phd funding (bilingualism), Spain
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Predoctoral Grant on syntactic processing
We are happy to announce a Predoctoral felloship financed by the Ministerio de
Ciencia e Innovaci?n (Spain) to work on a PhD project in the area of
language/syntactic processing and bilingualism. The grant lasts for three years,
working at the University of the Basque Country in the "Bilingual Mind" research
group, within a research project that intends to bridge theoretical linguistics
and experimental approaches to the study of language.
The fundamental question we aim to address is how syntactically distinct
languages are processed in the brain. We intend to discriminate between
language-universal and -specific aspects of language processing and thereby
narrow the gap between linguistic and cognitive neuroscientific approaches to
language. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) are useful in this endeavor, as
they reveal millisecond-by-millisecond changes in neural activity during
language processing. Specifically, we want to explore the impact of language
variation (syntactic parameters) in language representation and processing. We
intend to study how specific aspects of Basque syntax (particularly those that
are parametrically different from Spanish syntax) are processed by native versus
nonnative bilingual speakers. Our working hypothesis is that the
structural-computational component of grammar can reveal age effects, provided
the parametric settings of the native and nonnative language vary. This is why
we propose to study Basque-Spanish and Spanish-Basque bilinguals, of differing
ages of acquisition, targeting specific linguistic phenomena that have been
independently argued to constitute good candidates of syntactic parameters: the
head-parameter, ergativity-accusativity, types of agreement (verbal and NPI
licensing), and the syntax of relative clauses (attachment and subject/object
advantage) among others.
Salary: Standard predoctoral fellowship
Desired Education Level: MA
Other Desired Qualifications: MA in linguistics or psycholinguistics preferred
but not required
Application Deadline: 15-Jan-2010
Web Address for Applications: http://www.elebilab.com/public_home/ctrl_home.php
Contact Information:
Itziar Laka
itziar.laka@ehu.es
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