Jude T. W. Singleton

I am a psycholinguistics researcher at the University of Florida where I manage the Brain, Language, and Bilingualism Lab. Previously, I obtained my Master’s in Linguistics from UF under Dr. Edith Kaan. Prior to this, I double-majored in Linguistics and English during my undergrad at UF.

My research primarily moves between and interacts with three broad questions I have about language (processing):

1). How do we store and represent linguistic information we encounter from different speakers, in specific lects, and within specific environments? How can we computationally disentangle the contributions of distributional v. social information to these representations, if they can be meaningfully discretized, when analyzing online and offline measures of cross-speaker/lect/context processing? And, how does this knowledge change or adapt over the course of the life-span and as a function of (recent) experience and exposure?

2). How can we take a more rigorous and quantitative approach to measuring the amount of (ambient) linguistic exposure and experience people have? What does measuring experience and exposure mean for different populations, especially where there is divergence about labeling oneself a speaker and problems of prestige or prejudice? How can we more effectively engage marginalized but not marginal communities in (psycho)linguistics research?

3). How pervasive, automatic, and homogeneous is prediction during language processing? To what extent do task effects and design choices, including the context of study, influence indices of online processing? How might predictive processing be scaffolded by offline features?

Some conceptually non-orthogonal research I have been involved with includes: fieldwork with contextual felicity constraints in Bura, a Chadic language; corpus research on adjective and binomial ordering preferences cross-linguistically in children and adults; and, the use of codeswitching in multilingual Haitian-American Hip Hop as a strategy to negotiate the terms of so-called linguistic authenticity.

Feel free to explore my Projects to see how I have engaged with these questions thus far!

Outside of research, I am passionate about American maximalist fiction, the filmographies of David Lynch and Béla Tarr, Rainer Maria Rilke, and the music of Swans and Sun Kil Moon.