Are Word Bits Equally Pesky in All Languages and for All Brains?

The Interdisciplinary Committee on Linguistics (ICOL) at ASU presents a talk by Vedran Dronjic, associate professor of applied linguistics at Northern Arizona University. 

This talk highlights findings from two ongoing investigations of the cognitive and neural underpinnings of morphological learning by adults. The first project focuses on the learning of case and number in three typologically distinct artificial languages (isolating, agglutinative, fusional). The second project focuses on the learning of an artificial language which expresses derivational relations using three types of morphology: root-and-pattern, concatenation and suppletion. A battery of cognitive tests (e.g., fluid and crystallized intelligence, declarative memory, procedural memory, short-term memory, etc.) was also administered to participants. Dronjic discusses the effect of morphological type, cross-linguistic transfer, and cognitive abilities on learning as well as the nature of the resulting processes and neural representations.

Vedran Dronjic is an associate professor of applied linguistics at Northern Arizona University, where he directs the Language and Memory Lab. He holds a doctoral degree from the University of Toronto. He uses psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic techniques to investigate morphological learning, representation and processing, morphological awareness, vocabulary and reading processes in adults and children.