Elisabeth Norcliffe

I am a linguist, with research interests straddling the areas of linguistic typology, psycholinguistics and historical linguistics. One strand of my work focusses on typological variation and the factors (communicative, cultural, cognitive) that shape and constrain it. A second, related strand concerns the consequences of typological variation for language processing. Much of my work draws on primary data from indigenous languages of Meso and South America, as well as on large-scale typological datasets, and involves a range of behavioural experimental, quantitative and qualitative methods.

I am also involved in the linguistic documentation and comparative-historical analysis of languages of Andean South America, with a particular focus on Guambiano (Nam Trik) and related Barbacoan languages of Ecuador and Colombia.

I am currently a visiting researcher with the Surrey Morphology Group, University of Surrey. Previously, I was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford, and before then, a staff scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. I hold a Masters in Linguistics from the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) and a PhD in Linguistics from Stanford University.