Sarah F. Phillips

Toward a linguistically inclusive model of language processing

Maybe for your brain, switchin’ it up ain’t got much switchin’ at all.

Several models of bilingual language processing include a mechanism that is responsible for managing a bilingual’s different languages. This comes from behavioral and neuroimaging evidence demonstrating effects of language switching on processing. However, using less-artificial language-switching stimuli seems to reduce or eliminate such effects. In this talk, I will present both electrophysiological and behavioral evidence to argue for a single model that can account for both monolingual and multilingual language processing. The intended consequence of this work on neural-based computational models is to re-think what information is important for learning and processing any linguistic input.


Sarah is a Linguistics PhD student at New York University. Her research focuses on code-switching and how this phenomenon can answer bigger questions about how we acquire and process languages.

Presentation Materials

Talk Video