Month: November 2017

How do speakers get from thought to language? How do comprehenders get from form to meaning? What is the best way to test our hypotheses on language and cognition?

Those are the questions that the Language Comprehension Lab at UCSD seeks to answer. We are especially looking for:

• native or near-native speakers of Hindi, Italian, Farsi, French, or German
• Computer Science, Linguistics, Psychology, or Cognitive Science majors or minors

To apply, please visit our Join our Lab! page and fill out the application form.

The California Meeting on Psycholinguistics is being held at UCLA on December 2nd-3rd, and our lab will be there to give three talks:

This is the structure that we wonder why anyone produces it: Resumptive pronouns in English hinder comprehension.
Talk by Adam Morgan, Titus von der Malsburg, Victor S. Ferreira, & Eva Wittenberg.

Subcategorization preferences of verbs reveal syntactic processing in evoked intracranial potentials.
Talk by Adam Morgan, Erik Kaestner, Victor S. Ferreira, Meilin Zhan, & Eric Halgren.

The mess reveals the system: People use top-down cues to resolve errors in contexts with highly random noise, but not with highly structured noise.
Talk by Suhas Arehalli & Eva Wittenberg.

Abstract:

Clearly, structural priming is a valuable tool for probing linguistic
representation. But we don’t think that the existing results provide strong
support for Branigan & Pickering’s (B&P’s) model, largely because the
priming effects are more confusing and diverse than their theory would
suggest. Fortunately, there are a number of other experimental tools
available, and linguists are increasingly making use of them.

Read the commentary here!