Andrew Collins

Welcome!

I am a 5th year PhD candidate within the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas. My research deals with the neurocognitive factors that underlie the acquisition and use of morphosyntactic features and agreement within a second language or a first language following brain injury. I primarily address these topics by unifying linguistic theory across healthy and aphasic populations with a combination of neuroimaging and psycholinguistic methods.

In the broadest sense, my research interests address the neurobiological basis of bilingualism. I am particularly curious about the nature of language loss in bilinguals as a language-specific or cross-language phenomenon, the neural structures involved in language processing for the bilingual brain, and the role of domain-general cognitive ability as a modulator of language (re-)acquisition. Crucially, this interest encompasses both the learning of a second language and the relearning of a first language by people with aphasia. Why are some people able to attain near-native performance in a second language while others struggle to form basic sentences? Why do some people with aphasia recover their language abilities while others maintain linguistic deficits? Why are certain types of errors more common in aphasic populations and do these overlap with second language learners? What factors drive the similarities between these two distinct forms of language learning?

I was a 2019 University Graduate Fellow, and I am a member of both the Neurolinguistics and Language Processing Laboratory and the Second Language Acquisition Laboratory. I am co-advised by Dr. Alison Gabriele and Dr. Robert Fiorentino. I am also a member of the Adult Language Network (ALN) Lab at the University at Buffalo where I work with Dr. Nichol Castro. I was a 2023 National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders (NIDCD) Research Symposium in Clinical Aphasia (RSCA) Fellow at the 2023 Clinical Aphasia Conference where I presented a poster titled "Connecting second language morphological theory to aphasia rehabilitation".