Position Title
Distinguished Professor of Psychology
Affiliated Faculty, Center for Mind and Brain
- Department of Psychology
- Center for Mind and Brain
My area of research is psycholinguistics. Our studies investigate both language production and comprehension and cover topics such as syntactic encoding, planning of utterances and discourse, generation and interpretation of prosody and disfluency, language processing in understudied languages, language-vision interactions, reading, and eye movement control. We use a wide range of methods including behavioral techniques, eye tracking in reading and listening, electrophysiology, and fMRI. The theoretical approach we adopt assumes that language processing often relies on the use of heuristics which allow the listener to quickly extract a sentence’s meaning, particularly in naturally demanding communicative contexts, but which also may sometimes lead to misinterpretations. We also explore the production of multi-utterance sequences, often given in response to stimuli and events shown visually. These studies thus address a core question in cognitive science relating to the interaction between the visual and language processing systems. We also explore the circumstances under which speakers provide more linguistic content than seems necessary for communicative success, how speakers choose from among grammatical options for expressing their thoughts, and to what extent speakers interleave planning and articulation to promote production efficiency. Another line of work investigates the role of prediction in healthy young and older adults and considers how information-theoretic measures of predictability (surprisal and entropy) influence online processing during language comprehension.
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