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Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan was a Fulbright Scholar to Bulgaria in 2022 working on how speakers process sentences under interference as well as the underlying principles of the cognitive architecture of human language. Her findings will inform theoretical research and have implications for second-language learning and language-related disorders. Here are a few projects she has been developing since she completed her Fulbright.
1) One of her M.A. students in her psycholinguistic course at Sofia University, Andrey Ivanov and Tanya wrote an article on the state-of-the-art of Slavic psycholinguistics and the role of Bulgarian language in psycholinguistic research. The article will be published in the Proceedings from the International conference Единство и разделение в езиците, литературите и културите that took place at Sofia University in May. Tanya will continue her collaboration with Andrey who successfully defended his M.A. thesis in September and is now applying for the PhD program in Bulgarian Language at Sofia University.
2) Tanya Ivanova-Sullivan was invited to collaborate on an international project, called BASTA (Baltic and Slavic Tense and Aspect) and financed by the Polish National Science Center https://basta.uwr.edu.pl/project-desciption/
The project involves annotating the tense and aspect in the Slavic translations of Harry Potter. I was able to recruit two third-year students from Sofia University who are annotating the Bulgarian translation under her supervision. The results of the project will be presented at several international conferences and published in high-impact journals. Tanya is particularly happy that Bulgarian students have the opportunity to take part in European projects and share insights with senior scholars in the field of Slavic linguistics.
3) Tanya is in the process of submitting an article with the results of her Fulbright project in late 2022. The results are very interesting and informative of the way morphosyntactic categories are processed by Bulgarian speakers.
4) Thanks to the publicity about her Fulbright award last year, a graduate student from the University of New Mexico, is applying for Fulbright in Bulgaria and asked Tanya to evaluate her Bulgarian (she is a heritage speaker of Bulgarian who grew up in Chicago).
“I am really glad that more and more Americans are interested in doing projects in Bulgaria and want to collaborate with local scholars and professionals – this is in tune with the Fulbright mission,” Tanya said.