Nayoung Kwon works in neuro- and psycholinguistics, with a focus on human sentence processing. Her research asks how the language system interacts with other cognitive functions and how grammatical variation across languages is reflected in real-time processing. She investigates these questions by examining both structural phenomena and interfaces between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Methodologically, her work takes a cross-linguistic approach and uses experimental techniques such as event-related brain potentials (ERPs), eye-tracking, and self-paced reading.
Some of her representative publications are as follows.
Kwon, N., & Shin, G. (2025). Overgeneralization of Korean subject honorification by English-speaking learners of Korean. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition.
Kwon, N., & Mun, S. (2025). Evaluating Syntactic Generalization in Transformer-Based Models Using Korean Honorific Agreement. PACLIC 39.
Lee, E., Kwon, N., & Seong, J. (2025). L2 Korean metonymy: The relative role of conceptual universal and conventionalization. Second Language Research.
Kwon, N., & Lee, Y. (2024). When grammaticality is intentionally violated: Inanimate honorification as a politeness strategy. Journal of Pragmatics.
Kwon, N., & Sturt, P. (2024). When social hierarchy matters grammatically: Investigation of the processing of honorifics in Korean. Cognition. (link to the osf project page)
Sturt, P., & Kwon, N. (2023). Agreement attraction in comprehension: Do active dependencies and distractor position play a role? Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.
Kwon, N. (2020). The processing of a long-distance dependency in Korean: An overview. The Cambridge Handbook of Korean Linguistics.
Kwon, N., Sturt, P, & Liu, P. (2017). Predicting semantic features in Chinese: evidence from ERPs. Cognition, 166, 433-446.
Kwon, N., & Sturt, P. (2014). The use of control information in dependency formation: An eye-tracking study. Journal of Memory and Language, 73, 59-80.
Kwon, N., Kluender, R., Kutas, M., & Polinsky, M. (2013). Subject/Object processing asymmetries in Korean relative clauses: Evidence from ERP data. Language, 89(3), 537-585.
