Grace deMeurisse

About me:

Welcome to my website! I am a recent PhD graduate from the Department of Linguistics at the University of Florida, and a Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Bard College. Broadly, I research psycholinguistics. My two primary lines of research include bilingualism and cognitive control, and second language (L2) sentence processing.

My dissertation research investigated L2 processing of a particular syntactic construction called negative polarity. Have you ever heard sentences like "nobody has ever wished me happy birthday" or "only few people have ever read my thesis"? These are both examples of negative polarity; the item "ever" is called the negative polarity item, and it is "licensed" in negative contexts, as in the presence of the word "no" or "only".

My research investigates whether pragmatic competency, and/or degree of negation (i.e., "no" is stronger than "only") modulates certain behavioral and neural indices of processing, such as response time (RT) and Event Related Potentials (ERPs), respectively.

Outside of my academic interests and research, my personal interests and hobbies include photography, hiking, walking, and re-watching the same Netflix shows ten times over (Gilmore Girls). 

I also speak Danish -- Jeg kan også tale på Dansk. I always look forward to a good conversation in Danish (jeg glæder mig altid til en god samtale på Dansk) :-)

file:///Users/grace/Downloads/google7298f46fa3ccd78e%20(1).html