Laura Winther Balling

Presentation

I''m fascinated by the fact that people can understand and produce language as quickly as they can – recognising 2-3 words per second. My research focuses on some of the mental processes that enable us to do this: I study the recognition of words and decoding of syntactic structure in both first and foreign languages. I also investigate the (even more complex) process of translation where translators must comprehend one language and produce another in parallel. I use experimental methods, including reaction time experiments and eye-tracking, to study this. Another, derived interest is experimental design and statistical methods for linguistic research.

I am the lab director of MSC''s experimental laboratory, CogLab.

Primary research areas

• Psycholinguistics
• Word recognition and the mental lexicon
• Text comprehension
• Experimental methods and statistics in linguistics
• Sentence processing

Courses

• Quantitative Methods (BA & PhD)
• Academic English (BA)
• Text production and analysis

Supervision

• Psycholinguistics, cognition of language
• Experimental studies of language and communication
• Eye tracking
• Second/foreign language acquistion and processing