Hi friends! 

My name is Shane Hansen. I am a rising senior perusing a BPhil in Neurolinguistics and a BS in Chemistry. I am also working toward a Conceptual Foundations of Medicine certificate and a transcript distinction in Learning Sciences. 

In terms of the future, I am still a bit undecided. I have identified as “pre-med” through my entire college career, but as I have been involved more with research, I am realizing that I may have professional interests lying in that direction. This summer, I have the honor of being a Brackenridge Fellow as I conduct the research for my Bachelor of Philosophy. This opportunity may very well help me inform where exactly I would like to go upon completion of undergrad. 

With all that, you may be wondering: what exactly is my BPhil project about? To put it “simply,” I am investigating the neural mechanisms that process nonbinary pronoun constructions and exploring how they may differ between an individual’s first and second language. Now let’s break that down a bit.

In neurolinguistics, a popular technique to probe into the cognitive processes going on in our brains is electroencephalography (EEG). This involves placing electrodes on a participant’s scalp which pick up the brainwaves that are generated from neural activity. From an EEG recording, we can extract Event Related Potentials (ERPs) which are characteristic waveforms that are time locked to a particular stimulus (the “event,” for our purposes, is typically a word in a sentence) and signify certain cognitive processes occurring in the brain. Common to research in neurolinguistics are the N400 and P600 waveform components, which signify the processing of word meaning and grammaticality, respectively. There are many other distinct ERPs which have been found to correlate with various important language-related processes.

We can use the presence or lack thereof of these characteristic ERPs to understand how participants are processing inputs. My study is first going to be teaching participants a basic introduction to French grammar and vocabulary. Then, while undergoing EEG recording, participants will read and be asked to judge the acceptability of sentences in English and French, some of which will use nonbinary pronoun constructions. It is my hope that the ERPs elicited by the pronouns will be informative as to how participants perceive them in a native versus second language. I am also optimistic about gaining insight into how the behavioral ratings of nonbinary pronouns may or may not correlate to the neural responses, suggesting why exactly some people cannot grasp the use of nonbinary pronouns.

I believe that my work here has the potential to contribute to a small but growing pool of knowledge on how we process nonbinary gender identities in language. It is my hope that insights gained from this study can help us make progress towards a more diverse and inclusive understanding and use of human language. We may realize new ways to go about educating people on these language constructions and, novelly, how to include these in second language instructional settings. This is ultimately important for creating safer existences for nonbinary individuals.  

None of this work would be possible without the insurmountable support from my BPhil advisor, Dr. Natasha Tokowicz and the rest of the team in the PLUM Lab (Psycho-Linguistic Underpinnings of Multilingualism) and at the Learning Research and Development Center. Together we are creating new knowledge that will catalyze improvements in language learning.