I am a graduate student in Linguistics (ABD) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. My academic adviser is Prof. Jennifer Cole. My Ph.D. thesis topic is “Structural and Prosodic Correlates of Perceived Prominence in Free Word Order Language Discourse”
The focus of my graduate research is understanding prosodic and structural encoding of (spoken) discourse in a free word order language. Specifically, I am interested in how structural packaging of information may be further enhanced by acoustic-prosodic means and surface ordering of arguments in a sentence or phrase and how structural and prosodic cues are deployed by the speaker and the listener. Exploring this question for L2 speakers, I am interested in the L1-transfer effects on L2 prosody and L1-L2 differences in structural and prosodic cue validity. My graduate research involves testing these questions for Russian, a highly free word order language, which allows for (cross)application of prosodic expression and word order to communicate various degrees of information salience and accessibility in discourse (Luchkina & Cole 2013, Luchkina & Cole, 2014, Luchkina & Cole, under review). In 2015, together with Prof. Cole, Beckman postdoc Preethi Jyothi, and UIUC graduate Vandana Puri, I started researching this question for Hindi, a free word order SOV language (Luchkina, Cole, Jyothi, Puri 2015).
Apart from my dissertation work, I collaborate on research projects which investigate Prominence in Hindi (joint work with Cole, Jyothi, and Puri), Determiner Scope (comprehension and processing) in English and L1, L2, and Heritage Russian (Ionin et al. 2014, Ionnin & Luchkina (multiple papers, see Publications tab) and L2 Russian Proficiency testing (joint work with Prof. Tania Ionin).
You can find a copy of my CV here and you can email me at luchkin1@illinois.edu