On March 26th, linguistics major Michael De Matto presented his honors BA thesis research at the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum.

Michael's project, "Everything is relative (frequency): Lexical processing across languages," is a cross-linguistic investigation of the effect of the distributional properties of complex words (specifically, the relative frequency of complex words to their bases) on morphological processing. Michael is conducting parallel experiments in Russian and English to determine whether the languages' different word frequency distributions correlate with processing differences. The results will help us to understand whether cognitive processing of word structure operates in the same way in all languages, and whether morphological robustness plays a role in shaping cognitive processing. Michael presented a poster of his research in progress to Denman Forum attendees.

The project is being advised by Asst. Prof. Andrea Sims (Slavic Department).