<p> GLOSS and the Department of Linguistics Colloquium November 22, 3pm in 202 Agate Hall</p><p>Eric Pakulak Brain Development Lab, Department of Psychology University of Oregon</p><p>Effects of experience on neural organization for syntactic processing in adults and children</p><p>I will discuss ongoing research in the Brain Development Laboratory that focuses on language processing. We are examining the relative effects of language proficiency, socioeconomic status (SES) background, and age of acquisition (AOA) on neural organization for syntactic processing in both adults and children using event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using ERPs, we have previously shown that the neural response elicited by syntactic violations varies as a function of language proficiency and SES (Pakulak & Neville, 2010) and is sensitive to delays in language acquisition independently of proficiency level (Pakulak & Neville, 2011). Using fMRI as a complementary methodology, we found converging evidence that late bilinguals rely on different neural regions to achieve a level of proficiency comparable to some native speakers. To study children, we have developed a novel, ecologically valid ERP paradigm containing naturally spoken sentences in a coherent narrative accompanying an animated video. In preschool children, we are finding SES-related differences in the neural response to syntactic violations consistent with results from our studies of adults. Finally, we have also developed an evidence-based intervention for at-risk preschoolers that improves parent language behavior and receptive language in children (Neville et al., 2013); future work using this paradigm will examine the effects of this intervention on language processing.</p>