9453406 BURGESS This award provides support to Dr. Curt Burgess under the National Science Foundation's Presidential Faculty Fellows (PFF) Program. The PFF Program was established at the request of the President of the United States to recognize and support the scholarly activities of some of the Nation's most outstanding science and engineering faculty members early in their careers. Awards are intended to allow Fellows to undertake self-designed, innovative research and teaching projects, to establish research and teaching programs, and to pursue other academic related activities. This award will allow the investigator to pursue his research in psycholinguistics. Three areas will be pursued: (1) the structure in language and how the human language processor assigns syntactic structure to incoming language; (2) memory retrieval in language understanding and the role of sentence level constraints on recognition processes; and (3) development of computational memory retrieval systems in order to mimic human lexical/semantic memory. This research is important to understanding the dynamics of human memory retrieval, and how humans integrate new knowledge into an existing mental representation. In addition, it will result in a better specification of the higher-level neural processes involved in language comprehension, and a better understanding of how people recover from making errors of lexical or syntactic misassignment during the comprehension process. Ultimately, this knowledge can assist in more applied problems such as reading impairment and language rehabilitation after stroke. This five year award will also enable Dr. Burgess to train undergraduate and graduate students in interdisciplinary research areas spanning psycholinguistics, cognitive neuropsychology, and modeling with neural networks.
