On April 10th, two of our lab undergraduate research assistants presented their research at the Literature, Linguistics, Languages, and Culture (LLLC) Colloquium at Purdue University.

Marley Mack (mentored by Yue Li and Dr. Elaine Francis) presented her project titled “Animacy in English Object Relative Clause Structure Choice: A Comparative Study Between L1 and L2.” Her work explores how animacy influences the structure choice in English object relative clauses across L1 and L2 English speakers, contributing important insights to our understanding of sentence production and second language acquisition.

Lauren Mackenzie Matthews (mentored by Dr. Shaohua Fang) presented “Semantic Interpretation in Humans and Large Language Models of Quantified Statements.” Her research examines how human participants and large language models interpret quantified statements, shedding light on the similarities and differences between human cognition and computational language models.

We are incredibly proud of Marley and Lauren for their excellent presentations and contributions to the colloquium!

(Marley presenting)	(Lauren and Shaohua with their poster)	(Marley during presentation)	(Lauren presenting)