Readers and listeners make provisional or partial commitments at multiple levels of representation as linguistic input unfolds over time. The continuousness of comprehension raises methodological and theoretical challenges. The methodological challenge is to monitor comprehension processes as they are occurring. The theoretical challenge is to develop and evaluate explicit mechanistic models that support real-time comprehension. Such models are essential for understanding normal comprehension and its development, developmental disabilities, and comprehension impairments that arise from brain injury. The goal of this project is to develop and test explicit models of how readers and listeners coordinate linguistic and non-linguistic contextual information in constructing interpretations during real-time language comprehension. The proposed research examines the mechanisms underlying real-time language comprehension within a constraint-based framework emphasizing rich lexical representations and the incremental updating of a discourse model. Two lines of research are proposed. The first extends constraint-based models of ambiguity resolution to evaluate whether they can account for processing differences between different classes of verbs without direct appeal to syntactic complexity. These studies use corpus analyses, ratings, fragment completion, computational modeling, and reading time experiments. The second line of research examines how listeners establish, update, and refer to referential domains as an utterance unfolds over time, and how referential domains affect syntactic ambiguity. Reference must be contextualized to a relevant domain of interpretation. Although this domain ultimately includes information introduced linguistically into the discourse, salient objects in the environment, and shared presuppositions between participants in a conversation, little is known about how and when these different sources of constraint are used. The proposed work uses a head-mounted eye-tracking paradigm in which participants follow spoken instructions to move real objects in a workspace or pictures displayed on a monitor. By manipulating the objects in the display and the instructions, it is possible to determine the time course with which semantic and pragmatic constraints are used in circumscribing referential domains.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
2R01HD027206-09
Application #
6042738
Study Section
Special Emphasis Panel (ZRG1-BBBP-3 (01))
Program Officer
Mccardle, Peggy D
Project Start
1991-06-01
Project End
2005-04-30
Budget Start
2000-05-01
Budget End
2001-04-30
Support Year
9
Fiscal Year
2000
Total Cost
$239,785
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Rochester
Department
Other Basic Sciences
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
208469486
City
Rochester
State
NY
Country
United States
Zip Code
14627
Kurumada, Chigusa; Brown, Meredith; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2018) Effects of distributional information on categorization of prosodic contours. Psychon Bull Rev 25:1153-1160
Yildirim, Ilker; Degen, Judith; Tanenhaus, Michael K et al. (2016) Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation. J Mem Lang 87:128-143
Ibarra, Alyssa; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2016) The Flexibility of Conceptual Pacts: Referring Expressions Dynamically Shift to Accommodate New Conceptualizations. Front Psychol 7:561
Degen, Judith; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2016) Availability of Alternatives and the Processing of Scalar Implicatures: A Visual World Eye-Tracking Study. Cogn Sci 40:172-201
Gegg-Harrison, Whitney M; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2016) What's in a Name? Interlocutors Dynamically Update Expectations about Shared Names. Front Psychol 7:212
Heller, Daphna; Arnold, Jennifer E; Klein, Natalie et al. (2015) Inferring Difficulty: Flexibility in the Real-time Processing of Disfluency. Lang Speech 58:190-203
Pogue, Amanda; Kurumada, Chigusa; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2015) Talker-Specific Generalization of Pragmatic Inferences based on Under- and Over-Informative Prenominal Adjective Use. Front Psychol 6:2035
Brown, Meredith; Salverda, Anne Pier; Dilley, Laura C et al. (2015) Metrical expectations from preceding prosody influence perception of lexical stress. J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 41:306-23
Degen, Judith; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2015) Processing scalar implicature: a constraint-based approach. Cogn Sci 39:667-710
Brown, Meredith; Salverda, Anne Pier; Gunlogson, Christine et al. (2015) Interpreting prosodic cues in discourse context. Lang Cogn Neurosci 30:149-166

Showing the most recent 10 out of 51 publications