Alan Beretta

Biography

Ph.D. University of Edinburgh

Alan Beretta’s research in the Neurolinguistics/EEG lab has broadly examined linguistic representations, their neural implementation and their online processing. Currently we are focusing on the processing of compounds in various languages. We view compounds as a kind of model organism, a relatively controlled environment in which a variety of moving parts can be independently manipulated. In this environment, we are trying to observe processes as the milliseconds unfold, in event-related potentials and a range of behavioral measures. Among the processes of interest are the temporary commitments the parser makes at one constituent, the kinds of predictions that are made about what’s coming next as new semantic and syntactic information becomes available, the contributions of memory, how revisions are manifested, and so forth. These are familiar enough topics in language processing, but the goal is to see if some level of insight can be gained by a more controlled model organism approach.