As a doctoral candidate with near-native fluency in Spanish, I am currently working to complete my Ph.D. in Spanish Linguistics with an option in Applied Linguistics, and a doctoral minor in Linguistics at Penn State.

My research examines how first (L1) and second language (L2) verbal information influences the way in which grammatical structure is built during sentence comprehension. Recent studies in the monolingual domain have suggested that verbal information comes into play quickly during sentence processing and can ease the difficulty encountered during the resolution of temporary ambiguity (Garnsey, Pearlmutter, Myers and Lotocky, 1997; Wilson and Garnsey, 2001). Two types of verbal information that become available immediately during processing are the verb's subcategorization frame and the verb's preferences or biases (Trueswell, Tanenhaus and Kello, 1993). A verb's subcategorization frame denotes the type of complement that is permissible or required following a verb (i.e., direct object, prepositional phrase, etc.). Verb bias, however, refers to the verb's preferential subcategorization frame and plays a fundamental role in cases where verbs subcategorize for more than one complement type.

Garnsey et al. found that sentences in which sentential complement bias-verbs were embedded in sentential complement structures were easier to process than sentences in which direct object-bias verbs were embedded in sentential complement structures. To illustrate in English, a sentence containing a sentential complement-bias verb 'The ticket agent admitted the mistake might not have been caught' caused less processing difficulty (as measured by reading times) than a sentence containing a direct object-bias verb 'The CIA director confirmed the rumor could mean a security leak.' In the former case, the reader's expectations are met and the selection is confirmed as soon as it is recognized that the sentence construction supports the preferred subcategorization. In the latter instance, however, the reader anticipates a direct object after reading the verb 'confirmed' and is forced to reanalyze 'the rumor' as the subject of the ensuing clause.

To address the ongoing debate in the monolingual sentence processing literature regarding the extent to which readers rely upon language-specific verbal information during reading, my dissertation has taken a novel approach by turning to bilingualism.