Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan
Lecturer/Research  |  2022-23

Bulgaria

Project Title: Gender agreement attraction in native and L2 Bulgarian sentence processing

Dr. Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan is associate professor of Russian in The University of New Mexico Department of Languages, Cultures, and Literatures. Dr. Ivanova-Sullivan’s interests and expertise are in the theoretical and applied aspects of heritage and L2 language acquisition. In her publications Dr. Ivanova-Sullivan examines the mechanisms and outcomes of language acquisition along with the role of input and other sociolinguistic variables. Her recent work includes experimental studies with adult and child heritage speakers in the areas of Russian and Bulgarian morphosyntax and discourse-pragmatics. Her research and teaching experience with Russian heritage speakers provide theoretical insights and pedagogical tools to address the specific type of linguistic knowledge and learning needs of heritage speakers in the classroom and beyond.

The Fulbright award will give her the opportunity to conduct a psycholinguistic study with native speakers and second-language learners of Bulgarian at Sofia University in Bulgaria in the Fall 2022. 

“The study focuses on the interference effects caused by mismatches of grammatical features in the production and comprehension of sentences, as for example, the mismatch in number between ‘the key’ and ‘were’ in the sentence ‘The key to the cabinets were rusty’. These mismatches, called ‘agreement errors,’ are found both in spontaneous speech and in well-edited texts,” she explained. “They can disrupt the way speakers produce and process sentences, increase the cognitive load on the language processor, and generally, test the limits of the working memory. Studies of interference effects can provide us with knowledge of the precise nature of the mechanisms of memory retrieval, one of the central phenomena in human sentence processing.”