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Organizers

Irina Sekerina, Chair of the organizing committee. PI Sekerina has experience with conference and event organization, including participation in organization of the Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference (when it convenes in New York City), now in its 27th year, and the 8th Annual Workshop on Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics (FASL-8). In 2006, together with Co-PIs Eva Fernández and Harald Clahsen, she organized and conducted the 2-day Workshop on On-Line Methods in Children’s Language Processing funded by the NSF Developmental and Learning Sciences (#0518438). The Workshop was held at the CUNY Graduate Center in March 2006, with 120 attendees and resulted in publication of the volume based on the talks given during the Workshop (Sekerina et al., 2008) (see Section 6).
Dr. Sekerina has worked on heritage language bilingualism for the past five years and conducted an eye-tracking experiment that tests the BAH on the topic of quantifier spreading (Sekerina & Sauermann, 2014).

Virginia Valian, co-organizer. Dr. Valian is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at Hunter College, and Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences at the Graduate Center. Dr. Valian performs research on first and second language acquisition and bilingualism, investigating children’s early knowledge of syntax and second language learners’ and bilinguals’ knowledge of grammatical principles. Dr. Valian was a presenter at the Bilingual Advantage in Children and Adults: Types of Inhibition Control at the 9th International Symposium on Bilingualism in Singapore described above. In her study (Humphrey &,Valian, 2012), no bilingual advantage was found in RTs for incongruent-congruent trials for either the Simon or Flanker tasks, demonstrating that being bilingual does not necessarily provide advantages to young adults in cognitive processing.

Graduate students at the CUNY Graduate Center (Lauren Spradlin and Stephen Boatright).