Rebecca Tollan

Linguistics and Cognitive Science

Rebecca Tollan

Assistant Professor, Linguistics & Cognitive Science

rtollan@udel.edu

Office location

University of Delaware • 15 Orchard Road • Ewing Hall, 4th Floor • Newark, DE 19716, USA

Experimental Syntax Lab

302-831-6706 • experimentalsyntaxlab@gmail.com
University of Delaware • 105 The Green • Wolf Hall, Room 417 • Newark, DE 19716, USA

Education

Ph.D. – University of Toronto, Canada
M.A. – University of Toronto, Canada
B.A. – University of York, United Kingdom

Biography

Rebecca Tollan, Ph.D., is an assistant professor with the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Delaware. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in linguistics from the University of Toronto in Canada.

Tollan's research investigates how human languages are structured and how these structures are processed and understood by speakers. She works on a number of topics in syntax and psycholinguistics, including subjecthood and thematic relations, case and agreement, and long-distance dependencies, looking at data from a variety of languages. She is especially interested in the relationship between cross-linguistic syntax, sentence processing, and information structure, and her research makes use of a mix of formal and experimental techniques.

Research Projects

Experimental Syntax Lab

Two people looking at papers on the left and two people looking at a computer on the right

Researchers at the Experimental Syntax Lab study how sentences of human language are processed, with a special interest in the relationship between sentence processing, language typology, and formal syntactic theory. The research employs a variety of experimental techniques, including self-paced reading, visual-world eye-tracking, and grammaticality judgement studies, to examine how formal representations of linguistic structure interact with how we understand sentences that we’ve never heard before. Researchers study a variety of diverse languages including English, Korean, Mandarin, Niuean, and Japanese.