Katrine Falcon Søby

Primary fields of research

• Grammatical anomalies, Danish as a second language, corpus linguistics
• Processing of grammatical anomalies, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics

Current research

My PhD project has the working title: ”Convention-breaking grammar: A corpus- and psycholinguistic study of L1 and L2 speakers’ production and processing of grammatical anomalies”.

I’m affiliated with the research group ”Broken Grammar and Beyond” (BGB), lead by Line Burholt Kristensen. In the BGB group, we investigate naturally occurring grammatical anomalies, e.g. anomalous word order or inflectional suffixes, in texts written by L1 and L2 speakers of Danish. We combine the study of Danish as second language with psycho- and neurolinguistic methods.

The PhD project consists of two parts: a corpus-linguistic and a psycholinguistic. First, I investigate the types and frequencies of grammatical anomalies that occur in texts from L2 speakers of Danish. Based on the findings in the corpus study, I select some of the most frequent grammatical anomalies as stimuli in psycholinguistic reading experiments (I also include grammatical anomalies from L1 texts). The aim is to find out how native speakers react to different types of grammatical anomalies by measuring reading times and text comprehension.