Linh Pham

About Me

Hi! My name is Pham Le Nhat Linh (I love it when people call me Nhat Linh /ɲət lɪŋ/). I'm a 5th year PhD student studying linguistics at The University of Southern California (USC), where I am supervised by Professor Elsi Kaiser and Professor Zuzanna Fuchs

My main research area is psycholinguistics, with a focus on sentence processing. In particular, I investigate the mechanisms underlying dependency formation during real-time language comprehension. I use phenomena such as similarity-based interference and the active filler–gap strategy as diagnostics to understand how forward-looking prediction and backward-looking, memory retrieval interact and contribute to dependency formation. I am also interested in how other cognitive resources influence this process. My research primarily uses experimental methods, and I am currently learning to extend the work with evidence from computatinal analyses of neural data.

I'm also interested in bilingualism, particularly my research focuses on the shared-syntactic models in bilingual language processing.

Pursuing equality in education is another major mission in my life. Thus, I am operating social projects to provide education to underprivileged groups – Daffodils Education Project.

Interests

• Psycholinguistics
• Bilingualism / Multilingualism
• Computational Linguistics

Specifically: sentence processing and comprehension, anaphora resolution, cognitive factors in language processing (attention, working memory), and teaching English as a foreign language.

Education

• PhD in Linguistics (2024 – 2027, expected) — University of Southern California, USA
  Chairs: Elsi Kaiser, PhD; Zuzanna Fuchs, PhD
• M.A. in Linguistics (2022 – 2024) — University of Southern California, USA
  Thesis: Similarity-based interference in wh-dependencies: Evidence from Vietnamese in-situ questions (Chair: Elsi Kaiser, PhD)
• BSc Teaching English as a Foreign Language (2014 – 2016) — Ho Chi Minh City University of Education, Vietnam
• Certificate of Pedagogical Training — Hue University of Education, Vietnam