Lindsay Hracs

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the Linguistics program at the University of Calgary. I use corpus analysis and computational modelling to study the acquisition of the Focus Sensitive Particle 'only', looking specifically at the properties of exposure (i.e. the stimuli in the learning environment) and input (i.e. the stimuli needed to solve a learning problem). My work employs Bayesian modelling to determine whether learners are biased toward a certain type of input, e.g. structural position, semantic category, or overt context, and whether their biases change over the course of development. In addition to my own research, I have been working under PI Dr. Susanne Carroll investigating L2 learning in controlled exposure situations, most recently concentrating on classifier learning and learning from complex visual stimuli.