Affiliation: Lancaster University
I work in the areas of experimental psycholinguistics, experimental cognitive linguistics, bilingual cognition, linguistic and cultural relativity, first, second and additional language learning.
The main questions that guide my research concern language-driven human cognition and can be summarised as follows:
1. To what extent do speakers with different cultural and linguistic backgrounds think and perceive the world differently?
2. To what extent does additional language learning transform the way we perceive the world?
Recent research programmes have looked at the effects of colour terminology on colour categorical perception, the relationship between grammatical aspect and perception of goal-oriented motion events, the lexicalization of path, manner and causation of motion and motion event cognition, the effects of grammatical gender on object perception, the count/mass noun distinction and the construal of individuation, in populations such as monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual adults, child L1 and L2 acquirers, instructed and naturalistic foreign language learners, and involving speakers of languages such as Afrikaans, Arabic, English, French, German, Greek, Japanese, Sotho, Spanish, Swati, Swedish, Tswana, Xhosa, Zulu.