Language comprehension requires the listener or reader to rapidly integrate different types of linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge in order to develop a representation of the input. The question of how and when different sources of information are coordinated is central to understanding both normal language comprehension and comprehension difficulties in impaired populations. The proposed research investigates how syntactic processing is influenced by specific lexical knowledge associated with verbs and how syntactic processing is influenced by syntactically relevant information in the discourse. Research on the lexical-syntactic interface will examine how information about verb structure is used in parsing and interpretation. Research on the discourse-syntactic interface will focus on how discourse-based information is used in syntactic ambiguity resolution. In both domains it remains unclear whether the information is used to guide or to filter, and, if necessary, revise initial syntactic analysis. These questions will be addressed in experiments with both spoken and written language utilizing experimental procedures designed to investigate real-time language processing, including monitoring eye-movements in reading and speeded reaction time tasks with both auditory and visual materials. The results will enable us to test and refine current models of language comprehension as well as to identify significant modality differences between spoken and written language comprehension.
| Kurumada, Chigusa; Brown, Meredith; Tanenhaus, Michael K (2018) Effects of distributional information on categorization of prosodic contours. Psychon Bull Rev 25:1153-1160 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 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 |
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