Dr Dora Alexopoulou

Research Interests

Language Acquisition, Language Typology, Theoretical and Experimental Syntax, Corpora.

Biography

After a BA in Greek Philology at the University of Athens, I went to Edinburgh to obtain an MSc in Natural Language and Speech Processing and then a PhD in Linguistics. Before coming to Cambridge I worked at the Universities of Edinburgh and York and held an Intra-European Marie Curie Fellowship at the University of Lille III. I am one of the people who set up the Cambridge Bilingualism Network, a public engagement initiative promoting the linguistic and cognitive advantages of bilingualism and I am the founding Editor of Languages, Society and Policy. I joined Murray Edwards in 2016.  Since1 September 2022, I am Assistant Professor in First and Second Language Acquisition and Language Typology.

Publications

2001, Phonology competes with Syntax: experimental evidence for the interaction of word order and accent placement in the realisation of Information Structure, Cognition, 79.301-372 (with Frank Keller).

2002, On Linkhood, Topicalisation and Clitic Left Dislocation, Journal of Linguistics, vol. 38.2.193-245 (with Dimitra Kolliakou).

2006, Resumption in Relative Clauses, Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, vol.24.1,pp.57-111.

2007, Locality, Cyclicity and Resumption: at the interface between grammar and the human parser, Language, 83.1.110-160 (with Frank Keller).

2008, Binding Illusions, MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume on Greek Syntax and Semantics, with commentary by Uli Sauerland.

2010, Truly intrusive: resumptive pronominals in questions and relative clauses, in K.Grohmann and I.M.Tsimpli (eds.), Exploring the Left periphery, Special issue, Lingua,120.3.485-505.

2012, Focus in Greek Wh-questions, in Kucerova, Ivona, and Ad Neeleman (eds), Contrasts and Positions in Information Structure, CUP,  pp. 206-246 (with Mary Baltazani)

2013, Bare Number, in Folli, Sevdali and Truswell (eds), Syntax and its Limits, OUP,pp.300-323 (with R.Folli and G.Tsoulas)

2015, L1 influence on the acquisition order of English Grammatical Morphemes: A learner corpus study, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, with A. Murakami (principal author), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0272263115000352.

2015 Longitudinal L2 development of the English article in individual learners. In Proc. of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Philadelphia, PA: Cognitive Science Society, with A. Murakami (principal author).

2015, Exploring big educational learner corpora for SLA research: perspectives on relative clauses, launch issue of the International Journal of Learner Corpus Research,1(1), 96-129. doi: 10.1075/ijlcr.1.1.04ale with J Geertzen, A Korhonen and D Meurers.

2017, Task Effects on Linguistic Complexity and Accuracy: A Large-Scale Learner Corpus Analysis Employing Natural Language Processing Techniques, Language Learning, 67: 180–208, with M.Michel, A.Murakami and D.Meurers.

2016, L1 influence on the acquisition order of English Grammatical Morphemes: A learner corpus study, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 38(3), 365-401. with A. Murakami (principal author).
Winning paper for the 2016 Albert Valdman award.

2020, 'Grammatical Errors: What Can We Do About Them?', Languages, Society and Policy. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.6025 

2020, Big Data and Second Language Acquisition: advances in methodology and analysis, in Marrta Gonzalez-Lloret and Nicole Ziegler (eds), Handbook of SLA and Technology, Routledge, with A Murakami A.and D Meurers

2021 The impact of L2 proficiency on cross-language influence during L2 word processing. Cambridge Open Engage, with F Branzi, Y Chang and C Gaele doi:10.33774/coe-2021-fv5gt-v2

2021 How our linguistic mind guides language learning TEDxCambridgeUniversity, March 2021.