Kate Rice, one of our undergraduate concentrators, has received the Donald J. Cohen Fellowship in Developmental Social Neuroscience, a two year fellowship at Yale University. The primary project she’ll be working on is a prospective, longitudinal study of children from birth to 36 months.  One of the biggest components right now is eyetracking research.  The project hopes to be able to diagnosis autism sooner based on early differences in the tracking of social scenes.

Congratulations Kate!

Julie Boland and Robin Queen received a Faculty Research Award jointly from the Office for the Vice President for Research and the LSA Dean’s Office for their work on exploring the relationship between grammatical and natural gender in both implicit and explicit discrimination tasks.

Chris Odato and Deborah Keller-Cohen have had their paper, Evaluating the speech of older adults: Age, gender, and speech situation, accepted for publication at the Journal of Language and Social Psychology.

The paper is based on Chris’ Qualifying Research Paper.

Julie Boland presented the colloquium talk at Michigan State University’s Linguistics Colloquium series on Oct. 9.

Title and Abstract

Chinese Sentence Comprehension:  Recent Findings

Over the last several years, my colleagues and I have been investigating
syntactic processing in Chinese using self-paced reading, eye-tracking,
and ERP paradigms. I review our recent results in three domains: (i)
What cues guide incremental interpretation in the face is syntactic
ambiguity? (ii) To what extent are syntactic alternatives maintained in
parallel? (iii) Must semantic interpretations always be licensed by
grammatical structure?  I also compare our Chinese findings with results
from similar experiments done in English and other Indo-European
languages, with an interest in understanding what aspects of sentence
comprehension are universal and what aspects might be tuned by
language-specific properties.

Tutunjian, D & Boland, J. E. (2008). Do we need a distinction between arguments and adjuncts? Evidence from psycholinguistic studies of comprehension. Language and Linguistic Compass.

Abstract
Within both psycholinguistic theories of parsing and formal theories of syntax, a distinction between arguments and adjuncts is central to some theories, while minimized or denied by others. Even for theories that deem the argument/adjunct distinction important, the exact nature of the distinction has been difficult
to characterize. In this article, we review the psycholinguistic evidence for an argument/adjunct distinction, discuss how argument status can best be defined in the light of such evidence, and consider the implications for how grammatical knowledge is represented and accessed in the human mind.

Hsieh, Y., Boland, J. E. ,  Zhang, Y., & Yan, M. 2008. Limited syntactic parallelism in Chinese ambiguity resolution.  Journal of Language and Cognitive Processes

Abstract
Using the stop-making-sense paradigm (Boland, Tanenhaus, Garnsey, & Carlsen, 1995) and eye-tracking during reading, we examined the processing of the Chinese Verb NP1 de NP2 construction, which is temporarily ambiguous between a complement clause (CC) analysis and a relative clause (RC) analysis. Resolving the ambiguity as the more complex, less preferred CC was costly under some conditions but not under others. We took this as evidence for a limited parallel processor, such as Tabor and Hutchins’ (2004) SOPARSE, that maintains multiple syntactic analyses across several words of a sentence when the structures are each supported by the available constraints.

Deborah Keller-Cohen and Chris Odato presented the paper, “Talk too Much?:  Age and Speech Situation in Evaluating Others’ Seech:  Off-target Verbosity Revisited,” at the International Congress on Language and Social Psycoology on July 18, 2008

Hsieh, Yufen. & Boland, J. E. (2007). Narrative-object/modifieir noun ambiguity resolution in Mandarin Chinese. International Conference on Processing Head-final Structures. Rochester, NY, September.

Abstract:

Using the self-paced stop-making-sense paradigm (Boland et al., 1995), we examined the processing of the Chinese ‘Verb NP1 de NP2’ construction, which is temporarily ambiguous between a narrative-object structure (NOS) and a modifier-noun structure (MNS). Two experiments showed that resolving the ambiguity as the more complex, less preferred NOS was cost-free. We took this as evidence for a limited parallel processor that maintains multiple syntactic analyses throughout the ambiguous region of a sentence, when two structures are both supported by the available constraints. In addition, the data patterns replicated an important finding by Zhang et al. (2000), demonstrating that Chinese parsing is multi-constraint based and incremental.