Arild Hestvik
Arild Hestvik
Office location
University of Delaware • 105 The Green • Wolf Hall, Room 431 • Newark, DE 19716, USA
Experimental Psycholinguistics Lab
302-831-7007 • psycholinguistics@udel.edu
800 Barksdale Road • Newark, DE 19711
Education
- Ph.D. – Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
- M.A. – University of Trondheim, Norway
Biography
Arild Hestvik, Ph.D., is a professor with the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. He received his Ph.D. in psychology (linguistics and cognitive science) from Brandeis University and his B.A. in theoretical linguistics and computer science at the University of Trondheim in Norway.
Hestvik studies how the brain computes linguistic representations in real time. He also examines how the brain understands grammar and how language processing mechanisms develop in children.
Before he joined the University of Delaware in 2007, Hestvik was a NIH researcher at CUNY Graduate Center (2000-2006); a professor of linguistics at the University of Bergen in Norway (1995-2006); and a researcher at the University of Stuttgart (1990 to 1995).
Research Projects
The Experimental Psycholinguistics Laboratory examines the millisecond-by-millisecond incremental representation building that the mind/brain performs in response to language stimuli.
Lab Director
Research Areas
Psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience of language
Research Questions
- What are the components of the human language processing system?
- What is the relative timing of these components' activity during linguistic representation building?
- What can parsing tell us about grammar?
- How do the language processing mechanisms develop in children?
- How does this development interact with children's induction of grammatical rules?
- Do language-impaired children process language differently and is this the source of their acquisition impairment?
The research uses behavioral (reaction time and categorical data) and electrophysiological measures of brain activity (EEG and event-related brain potentials) to address these questions.
