I’m Syd, a doctoral researcher at the University of Edinburgh, reading for the PhD in Natural Language Processing. My supervisors are Frank Mollica and Jennifer Culbertson, who also supervised my dissertation for the MSc in Psychological Research. I hold an MSc (Distinction) in Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition from the Department of Education, University of Oxford. I earned a BA in Language Sciences with a focus on Theoretical and Portuguese Linguistics from the University of Lisbon. I also spent a semester in Germany at Saarland University where I studied Computational Linguistics and German.
Broadly, I am interested in language acquisition (L1 and L2) and formulaic language. Specifically, I investigate how learners acquire semi-productive verb-argument structures such as kill time, using behavioural and computational experiments. My research is inter-disciplinary, drawing on theories and methods from psychology, linguistics (theoretical and applied), cognitive science, computer science, and statistics.
I also dabble in experimental morphology with Professor Alina Villalva at the Centro de Linguística da Universidade de Lisboa where we investigate L1 Eurpoean Portuguese speakers’ intuitions on the formation of diminutives.