Anna Tsiola, 5th year PhD student in Linguistics, was recently awarded a scholarship from the Hellenic Link Midwest professional organization. Anna’s research interest centers on Second Language Acquisition and explores how different contextual modalities facilitate uninstructed language learning. She is working on her dissertation that uses eye tracking and psycholinguistic experimental methods to investigate how native English speakers incorporate in real time linguistic and visual information to learn the morphosyntactic rules of Greek, a language with inflectional morphology and no fixed word order. She is particularly interested in uninstructed, beginner language learning and how extra-linguistic information such as game visuals can help facilitate the learning process.

She got to know of the scholarship opportunity offered by Hellenic Link Midwest from Professor Angeliki Tzanetou from the Department of Classics, who had given a lecture for the organization. With support from faculty in the Linguistics department, including Dr Kiel Christianson, Dr Melissa Bowles, and Dr Tania Ionin, Anna was among a selected few awardees. These scholarships are given to students of Greek descent who are enrolled in accredited United States colleges and universities. Congratulations, Anna!