Possible topics for MA/MPhil/PhD supervision

I am happy to supervise research projects in the following areas:

First language acquisition

I can provide designs for experimental studies, supervise corpus collection, or make corpus data available, including my own extensive video-linked corpus of German, Dutch, and Japanese child language. I would welcome studies on morphological, syntactic or semantic aspects of child language, particularly on the development of noun phrase structure, argument structure, word order, and case or agreement marking. I would supervise acquisition studies on well-studied languages like English, German, or Dutch, but I would be particularly interested in acquisition studies on languages for which very few acquisition studies exist so far.

Grammatical processing

Potential research projects in this domain would involve reaction-time and/or eye-movement studies on grammatical processing in adult native speakers and first- and second language learners. Ideally, such projects would focus either on the role of morphological structure in the processing of individual words or they would investigate the role of argument structure, word order, and case or agreement marking in the processing of sentences.

For all of these topics, students should have a solid background in empirical research methods and the studies should be informed by theoretical approaches to the relevant domain.

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