Irina A. Sekerina, Ph.D, Professor at the City University of New York, will rejoin ZAS as a fellow in December 2021. She is a leading specialist in the area of Slavic psycholinguistics. She studies language processing in monolingual adults, children, and bilingual speakers using the Visual World eye-tracking paradigm. At ZAS, in collaboration with Dr. Natalia Gagarina, she will conduct two Visual World eye-tracking experiments with monolingual Russian adults (control group) and preschool children (experimental group). In this experiment, participants' eye movements are recorded as they process 4 picture stories from the Multilingual Assessment Instrument for Narratives (MAIN) (Gagarina et al., 2013). They will test the Referential Properties hypothesis by manipulating participants’ attention using a visual attention grabber.