Language comprehension requires the rapid integration of different types of information in order to arrive at an interpretation. Because the interpretation of a sentence is strongly constrained by its syntactic structure, readers and listeners must make at least partial syntactic commitments as a sentence unfolds, even when its syntactic structure is temporarily ambiguous. At the same time, a variety of constraints from the local sentence and discourse context will be available that could inform these commitments. Determining what these constraints are, and how and when they are used, is a prerequisite for understanding syntactic processing, and it is crucial for understanding the overall organization of the language processing system as a whole. Thus it is of central importance to the larger endeavor of understanding language comprehension in both normal and impaired populations. The current proposal is aimed at elucidating the mechanisms underlying syntactic ambiguity resolution within a constraint-based framework that emphasizes rich lexical representations, parallels between syntactic ambiguity and the incremental updating of a discourse model. We will explore the effects of--and the interactions among--several important sources of information, including the frequency of lexical forms and their argument structures, the thematic fit between a phrase and a potential argument position, and the effects of syntactically-relevant information from the discourse context. These goals are achieved through a combination of psycholinguistic experimentation using a variety of tasks designed to tap immediate processing (including monitoring eye-movements), analyses of corpora, and statistical and neural network modeling. We also develop a relatively novel line of research in which eye-movements to visual objects are monitored as people follow spoken instructions to manipulate the objects. The eye-movements can shed light on how people integrate visual and linguistic information and how visual context is used to resolve temporary ambiguities in spoken language.

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health & Human Development (NICHD)
Type
Research Project (R01)
Project #
5R01HD027206-05
Application #
2200290
Study Section
Sensory Disorders and Language Study Section (CMS)
Project Start
1991-06-01
Project End
1999-05-31
Budget Start
1995-06-01
Budget End
1996-05-31
Support Year
5
Fiscal Year
1995
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of Rochester
Department
Psychology
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
Carbary, Kathleen; Brown, Meredith; Gunlogson, Christine et al. (2015) Anticipatory Deaccenting in Language Comprehension. Lang Cogn Neurosci 30:197-211
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

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