Hi! I'm a PhD student at UCLA in the department of linguistics. My interests are in sentence processing, language acquisition, and semantics/pragmatics. I have secondary interests in intonation and computational linguistics. Currently, I'm investigating the selection of focus alternatives during real-time comprehension and the role of discourse structure in syntactic bootstrapping. I'm advised by Jesse Harris and Laurel Perkins on these projects respectively. Other mentors in the department include Dylan Bumford, Tim Hunter, and Sun-Ah Jun.
Before coming to Los Angeles, I was a Lab Manager for the XLing Laboratories at UMass Amherst where I earned my undergraduate degree. I was advised by Brian Dillon there. I like to procrastinate by cycling, making music, and staring at my aquarium. Here's what I listened to this week.
Papers
- Christian Muxica and Jesse Harris. To Appear. Constructing alternatives: evidence for the early availability of contextually relevant focus alternatives. In Alternatives in Grammar. Palgrave.
- Kuan-Jung Huang, Suhas Arehalli, Maria Kugemoto, Christian Muxica, Grusha Prasad, Brian Dillon, and Tal Linzen. 2024. Surprisal does not explain syntactic disambiguation difficulty: evidence from a large-scale benchmark. Journal of Memory and Language. [Link]
Conference Presentations
- Christian Muxica and Jesse Harris. 2024. Context rather than semantic priming drives the early availability of focus alternatives. Poster presented at the 3rd meeeting of Experiments in Linguistic Meaning at the University of Pennsylvania. [PDF]
- Christian Muxica and Jesse Harris. 2024. Focus alternatives are available early: no influence from semantic priming or particle choice. Poster presented at the 37th Annual Conference on Human Sentence Processing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. [PDF]
- Christian Muxica and Jesse Harris. 2024. Evaluating the role of semantic priming and particle choice in the early availability of focus alternatives. Poster presented at the 6th Annual California Meeting on Psycholinguistics at Stanford University. [PDF]
- Christian Muxica and Jesse Harris. 2023. Selecting contextually relevant focus alternatives during comprehension. Poster presented at the 10th biennial meeeting of Experimental Pragmatics, Université Paris Cité. [PDF]
- Kuan-Jung Huang, Suhas Arehalli, Maria Kugemoto, Christian Muxica, Grusha Prasad, Brian Dillon, and Tal Linzen. 2022. SPR mega-benchmark shows surprisal tracks construction but not item-level difficulty. Talk presented at the 35th annual Human Sentence Processing Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz (virtual).