Education

PhD in Psychology
MSc in Psychology
Degree (BA/MA equivalent) in Philology

Research interest: language acquisition, generalization, semantic and syntactic learning, attention

My research interest focuses on factors that boost or impede the abstraction of language regularities. What guides learners in the interplay between specific information and different levels of abstractness available in the input? My background is in language acquisition in infants and toddlers. My dissertation at the University of Quebec in Montreal under supervision of Dr Rushen Shi focused on the role of type and token frequencies in infants’ learning of rules and exceptions. During my post-doctoral work at the University Paris Descartes and Johns Hopkins University with Dr Thierry Nazzi, Dr Géraldine Legendre and Dr Isabelle Barrière, I focused on infants’ and toddlers’ acquisition of pre-syntactic and syntactic dependencies of Subject-Verb agreement. Now I am starting to work with Dr Ruth de Diego Balaguer on the role of attention in language acquisition.

Publications

Koulaguina, E. & Shi, R. (Accepted). Rule generalization from inconsistent input in early infancy. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics.

Koulaguina, E., Legendre, G., Barrière, I., Nazzi, T. (In Press). Towards abstract syntax at 24 months: Evidence from subject-verb agreement with conjoined subjects. Language Learning and Development.

Legendre, G., Gorashi, Y., Krasnik, S., Koulaguina, E. (In Press). Revisiting Root Infinitives: A view from French. Language Acquisition: A Journal of Developmental Linguistics.

Culbertson, J., Koulaguina, E., Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Legendre, G., Nazzi, T. (2016). Developing knowledge of non-adjacent dependencies. Developmental Psychology, 52(12), 2174-2183.

Koulaguina, E., Drisdelle, B. L., Alain, C., Grimault, S., Eck, D., Vachon, F., Jolicoeur, P. (2015). The perception of concurrent sound objects through the use of harmonic enhancement: a study of auditory attention. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 77(3), 922-9.

Koulaguina, E. & Shi, R. (2013). Abstract Rule Learning in 11- and 14-Month-Old Infants. J Psycholinguist Research, 42(1), 71-80.

Koulaguina, E. & Shi, R. (2010). The Mechanism Underlying the Learning of Rules and Exceptions in 14-Month-Old Infants. In J. Chandlee, K. Franich, K. Iserman, & L. Keil (Eds.), A Supplement to the Proceedings of the 34^th Boston University Conference on Language Development.