Syntax aims at a scientific understanding of how words combine together to form meaningful sentences; it investigates questions like: what are possible and impossible word combinations and structures; why do some combinations work, i.e. produce interpretable and sometimes ambiguous sentences, while others do not, how do speakers acquire the knowledge necessary to produce these combinations and how do they put this knowlege to use in everyday communication?

In our lab, we approach these questions comparatively, studying a variety of languages, with a special interest in Romance (especially French) and Creole languages, and experimentally using a variety of techniques (corpus searches, on line judgment tasks, truth-value judgment tasks, perception, acoustic analysis, and ERP).