Experimental Linguistics

Sunwoo Jeong

In this project, I investigate experimentally how prosody systematically affects veridicality inferences in Korean, both below and above the level of projection. I then discuss the cross-linguistic implications of the emerging patterns, and propose an alternatives-based account that derives factive inferences (i.e., projective veridicality inferences) based on information-structural considerations and lexical asymmetry.

James Whang

Professor James Whang’s primary research interests are in uncovering the cognitive mechanisms that underly phonological acquisition and processing, using experiments and computational modeling to build, test, and refine theoretical frameworks. He currently has two main research programs. The first program investigates the notion of predictability in linguistic processing. Its main aims are to understand and model (i) how humans learn to predict and (ii) how conflicting predictions that arise from different linguistic levels are resolved. The second research program investigates language-specific phonetic cue prioritization. The main questions in this program are (i) how language users learn which phonetic cues are (non-)essential for their target language, and (ii) how the informativity of such cues can be quantified.