We are delighted that Dr Hilary Wynne has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant for the following project:

Eliciting language-specific signatures for expertise in the human brain: a neurolinguistic investigation of expectation during sentence processing in expert listeners 

This project, in partnership with professionals in the aviation industry, looks at how general linguistic knowledge and expert linguistic knowledge influence expectation in sentence comprehension in pilots. Using a specialised language (many which feature small vocabularies and restricted syntax) is often an integral part of being an expert in a field (e.g. medicine, aviation). A known feature of specialised language is a highly constrained sentence context: so highly constrained, in fact, that there is almost always one allowed completion to a sentence in standard aviation phraseology.  We will use EEG to examine brain responses to standard and non-standard lexical items in different types of sentence environments. Overall, we expect this data to provide crucial evidence that “the expert brain” is cued to use special (expert) information when processing specialised language, and that violations in the standard (expected) language have deliberate and compelling effects in these listeners.