By way of a loose analogy with tuning a radio to a station, one could say that the brain is tuned to learning language, but also that languages are tuned to the brain, by displaying statistical regularities at all levels, starting from low-level phonetic and phonological properties.
I hope my work will contribute to shed light on normal, impaired, and late learning. The optimal tuning between brain and language is observed in normal language acquisition, because the brain of a child is incredibly apt at picking up statistical patterns of regularity in the stream of sounds she is exposed to (yet to become meaningful words and sentences!).
This ability may be severely hindered in children with
language impairments (affecting some 7-8% of the population), resulting in cascading consequences
for the development of the lexicon and grammar.
Likewise but for other reasons, for instance maturational constraints, or interference from first language, late learners of
a second language (like myself!) may also be suboptimal statistical learners. In turn, this might explain why second
language learners fall short of native-like fluency even when immersed for several years in a foreign environment.
This basic research is ultimately relevant to society, because the ability to learn a first or second language well and communicate efficiently in society has a tremendous impact on people's success in life.
Interests
Statistical learning of sequence structure; Computer simulations of language acquisition, and language impairment; Corpus-based analyses; Event-Related Brain Potential correlates of natural and artificial language learning; monolingual and bilingual sentence processing; language evolution.
Current Research Support
2006-2008 Onnis, L. (Principal Investigator), Christiansen, M.H., Spivey, M.J. Semantic Valence Tendencies in Monolingual and Bilingual Sentence Comprehension. National Institutes of Health's R03 Award ($158,000). [Abstract]
PEER-REVIEWED PUBLICATIONS
Onnis, L., and Christiansen, M.H.(in press). Lexical Categories at the Edge of the Word. Cognitive Science. [Abstract] [pdf]
Christiansen, M.H., Onnis, L., and Hockema, S. (in press). The secret is in the sound: From Unsegmented Speech to Lexical Categories. Developmental Science. [Abstract]
Christiansen, M.H., Conway, C., & Onnis, L. (2007). Neural Responses to Structural Incongruencies in Language and Statistical Learning Point to Similar Underlying Mechanisms. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf]
Baroni, M., Lenci, A., & Onnis, L. (2007). ISA meets Lara: A fully incremental word space model for cognitively plausible simulations of semantic learning. In Proceedings of the 45th Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. [pdf]
Christiansen, M., & Hockema, S., & Onnis, L., (2006). Using Phoneme Distributions to Discover Words and Lexical Categories in Unsegmented Speech. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Onnis, L., Monaghan, P., Richmond, K. & Chater. N. (2005). Phonology impacts segmentation in speech processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 53/2, 225-237. [Abstract]
Roberts, M., Onnis, L., & Chater, N. (2005). Language Acquisition and Language Evolution: Two puzzles for the price of one. In M. Tallerman (Ed.) Prerequisites for the evolution of language, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Abstract] [pdf]
Onnis, L. & Christiansen, M. (2005). New beginnings and happy endings: Psychological plausibility in computational models of language acquisition. Proceedings of the XVII Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. [Abstract]
Onnis, L., Christiansen, M., & Chater, N. (2005). Connectionist models of human language processing. In K. Brown (Ed.) The encyclopedia of language and Linguistics 2nd Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Abstract]
Onnis, L., Monaghan, P., Christiansen, M.H., & Chater, N. (2004). Variability is the spice of learning, and a crucial ingredient for detecting and generalising in nonadjacent dependencies. Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [Abstract]
Onnis, L. Christiansen, M., Chater, N. & Gomez, R. (2003) Reduction of uncertainty in human sequential learning: Evidence from artificial language learning. Proceedings of The 25th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp.886-891). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [Abstract] [pdf]
Onnis, Roberts, & Chater (2002). Simplicity: A cure for overregularizations in language acquisition? Proceedings of the 24th Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (pp.720-725). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. [Abstract] [pdf]
Onnis, L. (2001) Fluency in native and non-native speakers. Published undergraduate dissertation. In L.Onnis, A. Giacosa, B. Finger, & H. Rechenmacher, Aspetti linguistici e interculturali del bilinguismo. Milan: Franco Angeli. pp. 20-139. [Introduction]
INVITED TALKS
2006
Department of Psychology - Harvard University. Hosts: Marc Hauser and Andrew Nevins.
Department of Psychology - Carnegie Mellon University. Host: Lori Holt.
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences, University of Trento. Host: Marco Baroni.
Department of Romance Studies - Cornell University. Host: Dick Feldman.
Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive - CNRS, Marseille, France. Host: Johannes Ziegler.
Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique - CNRS, Paris, France. Host: Anne Christophe.
2005
SISSA, International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste. Hosts: Luca Bonatti and Jacques Mehler.
2004
Department of Cognitive Science, University of Arizona, Tucson. Cognitive Science Masters Series. Host: Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini.
Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson. Brown Bag Seminar Series. Host: Rebecca Gomez.
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