I’m a psycholinguist with a strong interest in human language and data science. I’m also interested in Natural Language Processing (NLP), i.e. the intersection between human language, computer science and artificial intelligence. I’m currently working for Amazon, where I use NLP tools to make Alexa understand Spanish in a more efficient and natural way.
I graduated from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) with a doctoral dissertation entitled Understanding Dependencies in Real Time: A Crosslinguistic Investigation of Antecedent Complexity and Dependency Length (available here) (outstanding cum laude), combining both EEG and behavioral methods to investigate how humans process dependencies between non-adjacent words or phrases. I hold an MA in Linguistics from the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and a BA in English Philology from the University of Oviedo (five-year program) (National Award for Excellence in Academic Performance), where I also defended an honors thesis entitled The Subjunctive Mood in English and Spanish: A Contrastive Study (Outstanding Degree Award).
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CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS
López-Sancio, S. & Laka, I. (2020). Efectos de localidad en dependencias locales y no locales. Talk at XLIX Simposio de la Sociedad Española de Lingüística, Tarragona, Spain, January 21–24, 2020.
López-Sancio, S., Ros, I. & Laka, I. (2019). Antilocality effects in main clauses: Evidence from Basque. Talk at Crosslinguistic Perspectives on Processing and Learning (X- PPL 2019), Zurich, Switzerland, November 4–5, 2019.
López-Sancio, S., Ros, I. & Laka, I. (2019). Antilocality effects in main clauses: Evidence from Basque. Poster at AMLaP 2019, Moscow, Russia, September 6–8, 2019.
López-Sancio, S. & Laka, I. (2019). Locality in unbounded and local dependencies in Spanish. Poster at AMLaP 2019, Moscow, Russia, September 6–8, 2019.
López-Sancio, S. & Laka, I. (2019). Dependency type modulates island effects: Evidence from Spanish, Talk at the 93rd Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New York City, USA, January 3–6, 2019.
López-Sancio, S. & E. Lau. (2018). ERP indices of encoding effects in wh-dependency processing. Poster at AMLaP 2018, Berlin (Germany), September 6-8, 2018. [pdf]
López-Sancio, S. & I. Laka. (2017). Subject island variation across dependency types in Spanish and Italian. Poster at AMLaP 2017, Lancaster (UK), September 5-7, 2017.
López-Sancio, S. (2017). An experimental evaluation of subject islands in Spanish and Italian. Talk at the Experimental Psycholinguistics Conference, Menorca (Spain), June 28, 2017.
López-Sancio, S. (2016). Testing syntactic islands in Spanish. Talk at the XII General Linguistics International Conference (CILG2016), Alcalá de Henares (Spain), May 23, 2016.
López-Sancio, S. (2015) Formal acceptability judgments: The case of island effects in Spanish. Talk at the 12th Workshop on Syntax, Semantics and Phonology (WOSSP 2015), Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain), June 26, 2015.
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PARTICIPATION IN RESEARCH PROJECTS
OVO: Originating Variation from Order
FFI2015-64183-P (2016 – 2018)
Funding agency: Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), Spain
Principal Investigator: Itziar Laka
Budget: €140,100
The Bilingual Mind
IT665-13 (2013-2018)
Consolidated Research Group of Excellence, grade A.
Funding agency: Department of Education, Language Policy and Culture, Basque Government
Principal Investigator: Itziar Laka
Budget: €284,398
AThEME— Advancing the European Multilingual Experience
EC FP7/SSH-2013-1 AThEME (613465) (Mar 2014 – Mar 2019)
Funding agency: European Commission.
Project Coordinator: Lisa L. Cheng (U. Leiden).
Budget: €4,999,990
