Research

I am interested in syntax, sentence processing, and neurolinguistics.

I have been working in the Aphasia and Neurolinguistics Research Lab directed by Professor C.K. Thompson in Northwestern University School of Communication since March, 2016. Starting August, 2016, I began working on an independent research project on Chinese relative clause processing.

I am also working in the Syntax, Semantics, and Sentence Processing Lab directed by Professor Masaya Yoshida in Northwestern University Department of Linguistics. I am particularly interested in wh-movement, ellipsis, and island constraints.

In summer 2018, I worked as a summer research intern at Massachusetts Institute of Technology under the supervision of Professor Ted Gibson.

Journal Articles

Accepted:

  1. Lu, J., Thompson, C.K., & Yoshida M. (to appear) Chinese wh-in-situ and Islands: A Formal Judgment Study. Linguistic Inquiry. doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00343 
Submitted/In Preparation:
  1. Lu, J., Sloggett, S., Krauska, A., & Yoshida M. (submitted) “Who wrote a paper that is on what?”: Island effect on multiple-wh questions.
  2. Lu, J., Walenski, M., & Thompson, C.K. (submitted) Syntactic Expectation as a Factor in Processing Difficulty Asymmetry of Chinese Relative Clauses.

Conference Presentations

  1. Examining Argument-Adjunct Asymmetry of Island Effect in Mandarin Chinese, Linguistics Society of America Annual Meeting (LSA), 2019, New York City, New York
  2. Chinese wh-in-situ and Islands: A Formal Judgment Study, The 24th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), 2018, Berlin, Germany
  3. EEG Evidence for Different Syntactic Expectations in Parsing Chinese Subject and Object-relative Clauses, The 10th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Neurobiology of Language (SNL), 2018, Quebec City, Canada
  4. Effect of Logic Chain Disruption on Zero-Pronoun Reference in Mandarin Chinese, International Linguistics Association 63rd Annual Conference, 2018, New York City, New York
  5. Verb Meaning and Subject-Position Zero-Pronoun Comprehension in Mandarin Chinese, Southern California Undergraduate Linguistics Conference, 2018, Los Angeles, California
  6. Syntactic Expectations in Processing Chinese Subject-Extracted and Object-Extracted Relative Clauses, 2017, Linguistics Society of America Summer Institute, Lexington, Kentucky
  7. Processing Asymmetry in Mandarin Chinese Relative Clauses: a Literature Review and Suggestions for Future Studies, 7th Great Lakes Expo for Experimental and Formal Undergraduate Linguistics Conference, 2017, East Lansing, Michigan