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Details for Dr Nina Kazanina

Personal details
Name Dr Nina Kazanina
Job title Senior Lecturer
Department School of Psychological Science University of Bristol
Contact details This expert can be contacted via the University of Bristol Public Relations Office.

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work+44 (0)117 331 8092
email:
Qualifications B.A.(Moscow), Ph.D.(Maryland)
Professional details
Keywords first language acquisition
second or foreign language acquisition
speech perception
sentence processing
neurolinguistics
psycholinguistics
Areas of expertise Language is constantly used by humans for sharing their needs and desires. People produce and comprehend linguistic utterances without any visible effort, yet objectively these are tasks of unprecedented computational complexity. Indeed, after more than 50 years of development the quality of machine translation and automatic speech recognition still does not compare with human performance levels.

I study how the ability to comprehend language is established in children, how an adult brain processes native language in real time and how new languages are learned and represented in the brain in adulthood. To explore these questions I use a combination of psychophysical techniques and brain imaging (in particular, electroencephalography or EEG).
Languages (other than English)
Russian spoken    written
French spoken   
Media experience I have participated in the AAAS (American Association for Advancement of Science) 2007 meeting and I have been interviewed by a few local (re:search) and national (Sunday Telegraph) papers.