research teaching education scholarships & awards publications presentations other
I was born in Jerusalem, a city which is as troubled as it is ancient, but found myself much more at home in Tel-Aviv, where I did my BA in Linguistics. After completing my BA I spent a magical year in Edinburgh, doing an MSc in psycholinguistics under the supervision of Martin Pickering and Holly Branigan. I am currently a first year PhD student in the Linguistics department at Stanford University, exchanging the grey Scottish sky for some California sunshine... research I am interested in psycholinguistics and language acquisition and more precisely, in the integrated research of both: what are the similarities and differences in how children and adults learn and process language. One line of research looks for similarities: how much of children's difficulty is driven by the same factors that make constructions harder for adults. I am especially interested in different forms of unbounded dependencies (relative clauses, questions, etc.) which are difficult for both children and for adults. ome of the factors I am interested in are the effect of referential properties of NPs, chunk frequency and syntactic predictability. My work on relative clauses shows that children's difficulty is reduced on the same relative clause types that are easier for adults (speficially, ones with pronouns in the embedded clause, the man that I visited). Another line of research looks for differences in the input (adult-directed vs. child-directed speech) and in the learning mechanisms. As a first step, Me and Michael Ramscar have been looking at the role of cognitive control in learning from probabilistic cues and the possibility that differences in cognitive control are correlated with age-related differences and individual differences in language learning. My interest in the processing and acquisition of complex syntactic structures ties in with a general interest in the nature of linguistic representations: what kind of grammar do we really have? How abstract is it? How categorical? I'm currently working with Hal Tily, Joan Bresnan, Neal Snider and Ahubha Kothari on understanding the kind of expectations that language users maintain about syntactic structure. I've also worked with the wh-group at Stanford investigating the nature and source of Superiority effects. teaching Fall 2006,TA for Ling1: Introduction to Linguistics (Instructors Penny Eckert and Ivan Sag) Fall 2007,TA for Ling240: First Language Acquisition (Instructor Eve Clark) syllabus education 2004 – now: PhD Linguistics, Cognitive Science designation, Stanford University 2003 – 2004: MSc Psycholinguistics, with distinction, Edinburgh University 2000 – 2003: B.A. Linguistics, Summa cum Laude, Tel-Aviv University, Israel scholarships and awards 2004 – 2009: PhD funding, Stanford University 2003-2004: British Council Chevening Award 2001: Dean Award, Tel-Aviv University 2000: Honorary scholarship for academic excellence, Tel- Aviv University publications Arnon, I (under review). Re-thinking child difficulty: The effect of NP type on child processing of relative clauses in Hebrew. Sag, Ivan A., Inbal Arnon, Bruno Estigarribia, Philip Hofmeister, T. Florian Jaeger, Jeanette Pettibone, and Neal Snider. Processing Accounts for Superiority Effects. Under review Arnon, I., Snider, N., Hofmeister, P., Jaeger, T. F., & Sag, I. A. (to appear). Cross-linguistic variation in a processing account: The case of multiple wh-qustions. To appear in Proceedings of BLS 32 Hofmeister, P., Jaeger, F., Arnon, I., Sag, I., & Snider, N. (2007).Locality and Accessibility in Wh-questions. In Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter Arnon, I. (2005). Relative clause acquisition in Hebrew: Toward a processing-oriented account. In A. Brugos, M. R. Clark-Cotton & S. Ha (eds.), Proceedings of the Twenty-ninth Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press presentations Tily, H., Arnon, I., Bresnan, J., Kothari, A., & Snider, N. (2007). What makes a construction predictable? Using semantic and contextual cues to better model phonetic reduction. Paper presented at The 20th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, San-Diego M\ arch 2007 Arnon, I. (2006). Re-thinking child difficulty: The effect of NP type on child processing of relative clauses in Hebrew. Paper presented at The 12th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Nijmegen, August, 2006 Arnon, I. (2006). Re-thinking child difficulty: The effect of NP type on child processing of relative clauses in Hebrew. Poster presented at The 19th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, CUNY, March 2006 Hofmeister, P., Jaeger, T. F., Arnon, I., Sag, I. A, & Snider, N. (2006). Locality and accessibility in wh-questions. International Conference on Linguistic Evidence. 2006. Feb. 1-4. University of Tubingen, Germany. Snider, N., Arnon, I., Hofmeister, P., Jaeger, F. T., & Sag, I. A. (2006). Processing accounts for gradience in acceptability: The case of multiple wh-questions. BLS. 2006. Feb. 10-12. Arnon, I. (2005). The processing of object relative clauses in young Hebrew speakers. Poster presented at the Xth International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Berlin, July, 2005 Arnon, I. (2005). On the use of resumptive pronouns in child and adult Hebrew. Talk given at the Xth International Congress for the Study of Child Language, Berlin, July, 2005 Hofmeister, P., Snider, N., Arnon, I., Estigarribia, B., Hofmeister, P., Jaeger, F., Pettibone, J., & Sag, I (2005). Processing Accounts for Superiority. Talk given at the S-TREND conference, Stanford University, April 2005 Arnon, I., Pickering, M. J., & Branigan, H. (2005). Passives are not always harder: On the interaction of syntactic structure and thematic fit. Poster presented at The 18th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Arizona, March 2005 Arnon, I., Estigarribia, B., Hofmeister, P., Jaeger, F., Pettibone, J., Sag, I. & Snider, N. (2005). Rethinking Superiority effects – A processing model. Poster at The 18th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, University of Arizona, March 2005 Arnon, I., Estigarribia, B., Hofmeister, P., Jaeger, F., Pettibone, J., Sag, I. & Snider, N. (2005). Processing explains Superiority effects. Poster presented at HOWL 3: Hopkins Workshop on Language. John Hopkins University, January, 2005 Arnon, I. (2004). Relative clause acquisition in Hebrew: Toward a processing-oriented account. Talk given at the 29th Boston University Conference on Langauge Development, Boston, USA, November, 2004 Arnon, I. (2004). The processing of object relative clauses in young Hebrew speakers. Poster presented at AMLAP-2004, Aix-en-Provence, France, September, 2004 Arnon, I. (2004). Child Acquisition of Relative Clauses in Hebrew. Talk given at the Postgraduate Conference, Linguistics department, Edinburgh University, May 2004 Arnon, I. (2004). Is movement all it’s about? The acquisition of relative clauses in Hebrew. Talk given at the Interdisciplinary Tea, School of Informatics, Edinburgh University, May 2004 other Family My dad Arie Arnon When my mom, Ruth Butler, finally gets a webpage she'll be added on... Some politics Reports of Machsom Watch on human rights violations in checkpoints in the occupied territories Support Israeli refusniks: Refusal Solidarity Network Follow La Otra Campana (the Other Campaign) the new phase in the Zapatista struggle in Mexico.	Inbal Arnon Stanford Department of Linguistics Margaret Jacks Hall Building 460 Stanford CA 94305-2150 (650) 723-9019 inbalar at stanford dot edu