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Beyond words: Ashley Benatar 

Decoding language processing

By Anna Sarkissian

Ashley Benatar may be heading south but her prospects are looking up. This fall, she will be taking up a funding offer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for her PhD.

She completed the health sciences program at Dawson College in 2005 and then came to Concordia for a BSc in neuroscience with a minor in linguistics.

Throughout her undergraduate degree, she organized and participated in several reading groups in linguistics and psychology; she presented a poster at Undergraduate Research Day; and she has been a guest lecturer on topics ranging from from psycholinguistics to phonetics.

At the McGill Infant Development Centre, she hired volunteers, organized meetings and managed the execution of experiments. She was a teaching/research assistant for a handful of professors, including Linnaea Stockall, with whom she continues to collaborate.

Though Stockall is now a visiting assistant professor at Hampshire College, they meet up on Skype once a week. “The distance hasn’t held us back,” Benatar says. In March, they jointly presented their work at the City University of New York Sentence Processing Conference.

Benatar continues to work as a lab manager and research assistant for the Neurolinguistics lab in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill University.

As for her doctorate, Benatar plans to study online processing of spoken language, as well as theoretical questions related to the architecture of the mental grammar. It could be anything from how we learn irregular past-tense verbs to how rising intonation affects the interpretation of questions.

“It all about learning how your mind works, looking at what factors transcend across different speakers of different languages, what correlates in the brain, and so on. It’s such a luxury that I get to explore these questions that I’m curious about,” she says. “I love that my field is so new. There are so many opportunities to contribute. I can’t imagine doing anything else.”