Nawras Abbas

I am a BA graduate in Special Education and English Language and Literature, and an MA graduate in Learning Disabilities from the University of Haifa. Currently, I am a PhD student in the department of Learning Disabilities.

My MA research, supervised by Dr. Anat Prior, examined interference from both languages; the first Arabic (L1) and the second Hebrew (L2), as opposed to interference from only one of the languages in third language (L3- English) syntactic processing, using grammaticality judgement task and eye-tracking measures. The central question addressed was whether L1 has a privileged role, or whether the entire linguistic repertoire is activated when processing L3. The results showed that learners of L3 have access to all previously acquired linguistic knowledge, and that the multilingual language system is fully interactive.

My PhD research, supervised by Dr. Anat Prior and Dr. Tamar Degani, aims to investigate L3 syntactic processing and uncover how it is influenced by existing knowledge of other languages. In a longitudinal design, we intend to explore whether proficiency changes in L1, L2, or L3 are associated with varying patterns of cross linguistic influence (CLI) from L1/L2 in L3 syntactic processing.

E-Mail: abbasnawras@gmail.com