Research
My research focuses on the structure of the mental lexicon in native speakers, adult second language learners, and bilinguals. I use psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic techniques to investigate whether these groups of people have similar or different structures to their lexicon.
Current Research
(Underway, here's a taste of what I'm getting up to)
Do heritage speakers of Spanish process Spanish verbal inflections according to morphological structure? Or do they instead store complex forms in their whole-form? Their incomplete acquisition of their first language and their dominance in their second language makes this an interesting investigation!
Select Papers
Coughlin, C.E., Fiorentino, R., Royle, P., & Steinhauer, K., (2019). Sensitivity to Inflectional Morphology in a Non-Native Language: Evidence from ERPs. Frontiers in Communication, 4, 1-21.
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2019.00021/full
Fiorentino, R., Politzer-Ahles, S., Pak, N., Martínez-Garcia, M. T., & Coughlin, C. E. (2015). Dissociating morphological and form priming with novel complex word primes: Evidence from masked priming, overt priming, and event-related potentials. The Mental Lexicon, 10, 413–434.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5683718/
Coughlin, C. E., & Tremblay, A. (2015). Morphological decomposition in native and non-native French speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 18, 524–542.