Conference Summary
30th Annual Second Language Research Forum
October 11-14, 2007, Urbana, IL

Naoko Witzel
PhD Candidate
Second Language Acquisition and Teaching GIDP

Attending the 30th Annual Conference of the Second Language Research Forum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign was a stimulating and rewarding experience. First of all, my co-authors and I had the opportunity to present our paper, "L1 to L2 Transfer in Bilingual Sentence Processing¡¨ in front of an audience of our peers in the second language processing field. We were able to receive valuable feedback on our study and also get useful suggestions for future experiments. Specifically, we were able to get insightful ideas from Alan Juffs, Lydia White, and Keil Christiansen, who are well respected researchers in our field. Secondly, I was able to attend a number of other talks on my area of interest, second language processing. I was particularly interested in talks dealing with how working memory and prosody impact the processing of sentences in a second language. Furthermore, I was able to learn more about the processing of relative clauses in a second language. I also enjoyed talks from other areas in second language acquisition. Finally, I appreciated the discussions I was able to have with other researchers in my field. I was able to speak with number of graduate students and professors from other universities.

I would like to thank the Graduate Interdisciplinary Programs for giving me the opportunity to present at this conference. My co-authors and I have been working on this project for over a year, and it was great to see our work recognized by other students and researchers. The feedback we received at this conference has already led to the development of follow-up experiments on lexical transfer in bilingual sentence processing. Overall, attending the conference has been a very productive experience.