UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Lauren Perrotti, a doctoral candidate in Spanish with a dual title in language science, received the Penn State Alumni Association Scholarship for Penn State Alumni in the Graduate School during the inaugural Graduate Student Awards Luncheon held on April 27 at the Nittany Lion Inn.
The purpose of the Penn State Alumni Association Scholarship for Penn State Alumni in the Graduate School is to provide recognition and financial assistance to students who have been admitted to the Graduate School at Penn State as candidates for a graduate degree, who demonstrate academic excellence, and who received their undergraduate degree from the University.
Perrotti is researching language use from both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic viewpoints, seeking to gain understanding of the language learning experiences of Spanish and English bilinguals residing in the United States and abroad.
Her dissertation will provide an account of how changes occur in native language performance, and in syntactic processing in the first language, when individuals acquire and are immersed in a second language.
In the words of one nominator, Perrotti’s project is “innovative in that it uses bilingualism as a tool to investigate critical constraints for the architecture of the language system and its interaction, more generally, with cognition. The findings have the potential to spur novel work across the many laboratories that have contributed to recent discoveries in bilingual populations, by providing the pioneering foundation on which future studies on the permeability of the native language system can be built.”