Main profile

Lara

Ehrenhofer

Interests: 

EEG, Language Acquisition, Language Processing, Phonetics, Phonology, Psycholinguistics, Speech Perception

Projects: 

Language Science Fellows, PULSAR

Units: 

Linguistics

Degree(s): 

PhD Linguistics, expected 2018, Department of Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park

MPhil General Linguistics and Comparative Philology, 2013, Department of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics, University of Oxford, UK

BA (Hons) English and Modern Languages (French), 2011, Merton College, University of Oxford, UK

Advisor(s): 

Colin Phillips, Bill Idsardi

Graduation Year: 

2018

Contact: 

ehrenhof@umd.edu

1413H Marie Mount Hall

Role(s): 

Alumni

Website: 

Lara Ehrenhofer

About: 

Any time we encounter spoken language, we have to rapidly extract relevant information from the acoustic signal, map it onto abstract phonological categories, and use these to build word representations with which to trigger lexical access. I’m interested in how this abstract phonological knowledge is acquired in childhood, and how it is organised and accessed in the brain. I’m also looking at how lexical categories and word order influence the way we generate predictions about upcoming sentence material. To investigate these questions, I combine neurophysiological methods like EEG with behavioural tasks such as a lexical decision task and self-paced reading.

Collaborators: 

Colin Phillips (Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park)

Bill Idsardi (Linguistics, University of Maryland, College Park)

Rochelle Newman (Hearing and Speech, University of Maryland, College Park)

Aditi Lahiri (Linguistics, University of Oxford, UK)