People

Research Interests

• Investigation of the mechanisms of language production, especially with regard to grammar, lexical structure, and speaker-hearer interactions.
• Computation and quantitative modeling of cognitive processes, including those involved in lexical access and syntactic production.

Research Interests

• How do bilinguals maintain such effective control over language selection, and to what extent does language control rely on domain-general executive control? Do older bilinguals have more difficulty juggling two languages, and how does Alzheimer’s disease change a person’s ability to speak two languages?
• The clinical goals in Dr. Gollan’s research are 1) to determine whether performance differences between bilinguals and monolinguals will interfere with the detection of cognitive impairment in bilinguals, and 2) to develop tests that cater more specifically to assessment of bilinguals.

Research Interests

• My research interests include phonological processing in language production, and language control in bilinguals. I have been working a series of studies that investigated how speakers in different age periods and/or with different language background retrieve and process phonological information during spoken word production. Currently, my work focuses more on language switching among bilinguals.

• My research focuses on the interplay between language and (non-linguistic) cognitive functions. My previous studies examined linguistic functions in adults with and without ADHD and currently I am focusing on the effect of bilingualism on linguistic and cognitive processing. As a speech and language pathologist, I am interested in exploring these questions in typically developed as well as in clinical populations (Alzheimer's disease patients and children with and without developmental disabilities).

Research Interests

• Are syntactic representations in two languages shared or separate in a bilingual's brain?
• Do bilinguals simultaneously access syntactic information of both the target language and the language not in use?
• How does L2 syntactic information influence L1 syntactic representation?

Research Interests

• My primary research lines involve using speech error elicitation techniques and artificial language learning paradigms to study a few broad questions: What cognitive mechanisms support syntactic processing, resulting in the process being fast, subconscious, and relatively error-free? How do learners acquire syntactic structures based on limited input in a constrained manner, such that they do not over- or under-generalize? What are the planning units in speech?
• My secondary interest is in using corpus studies to complement my behavioral work. The goal is to infer processing constraints and communication principles from diachronic patterns in language use. Please see my website for more.

Research Interests

• How do we translate thought to language?
• Where and how does the brain store abstract syntactic information?
• Why do all* SVO languages put relative clauses after nouns? Why do all languages that use resumptive pronouns also use gaps? Why are there so many SOV languages? Can general processing mechanisms account for these patterns or could they stem from innate linguistic knowledge?

Research Interests

• I apply behavioral and neuroimaging methods to examine language production and executive function in young and aging bilinguals (primarily Spanish-English), and bilinguals with Alzheimer’s disease with the goal of informing cognitive theories and improving neuropsychological assessment of the growing number of bilinguals.

Research Interests

• I am generally interested in bilingual lexical representation models and language learning through generalizations and constraints. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the possibility of expanding on preexisting models of language representation in bilinguals to multilingual language representation as well as looking at how different syntactic and semantic elements affect language production behavior.