French Linguistics

French Linguistics

Our French Linguistics faculty bring their expertise in a broad range of fields, including not only the core areas of linguistics, such as syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology, but also history of the language, lexicology and lexicography, sociolinguistics, dialectology, pidgins and creoles, second language acquisition and applied linguistics/pedagogy.

This breadth of scholarly expertise is combined with the research programs of our faculty members, who specialize in the following areas:

  • Sentence processing (information integration in second language processing) and development of interpretive knowledge (phrasal semantics, lexical semantics and grammatically computed pragmatic inferences)
  • Syntax and history of French (including Occitan)
  • Sociolinguistics, variation, morphosyntax, phonology, and Québec colloquial French
  • Language contact (Louisiana French, Welsh, Breton), lexicography, pidgins and creoles, and endangered languages
  • Phonetics, foreign language pedagogy and computer-assisted language learning

Meet our French Linguistics faculty Learn about our graduate program

Second Language Acquisition group

The Second Language Acquisition of French Laboratory offers a dynamic environment to engage in second language acquisition research on French. It supports the production of dissertation research, class projects and group research mentoring. Joint-authored papers have been published in open access venues and in archival journals such as Second Language Research and Studies in Second Language Acquisition, and as book chapters.

Current research investigates the role of real-time syntactic analysis (parsing) in sentence comprehension by native and non-native language users. This is done through psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic means. The goal is to better understand the role of parsing in acquisition and to understand the neuro-cognitive foundations of a continued ability to acquire second languages.

The Second Language Acquisition of French Laboratory supports various research studies including moving window silent reading experiments, cross-modal priming experiments, forced-paced reading aloud with picture classification, word monitory as well as eye-movement research with a portable Eyetech V2 mini Lab that allows off-site research and classroom demonstrations. Our neurolinguistic work takes place at the Imaging Research Facility.