Home | Research | Psycholinguistics Lab

		Psycholinguistics Lab
		Coordinator: William Badecker
			Lab Focus
			On-going Projects & Related Presentations/Publications
			Lab members
			Eye Tracking
	psyling@cogsci.jhu.edu Location: Krieger Hall, Rm 138A Phone: x 6-3833
			Participating in Experiments

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On-going Projects

• Planning and Producing Grammatical Agreement
• Auditory Lexical Access
• Processing Lexical Morphology
• Syntactic, Semantic and Discourse Factors in Sentence Comprehension

Planning and Producing Grammatical Agreement
Our work in this area focuses on the properties of the representations and processing mechanisms that are engaged in the planning of grammatical agreement. In particular, we have addressed questions concerning the role that markedness plays in selecting agreement values, how agreement may be affected by the linear adjacency of agreement controller and agreement target, and by the syntactic structure of the agreement controller.

Students:
Fero Kuminiak (Ph.D., 2002) has studied the role of lexical ambiguity in the planning of grammatical agreement in Slovak and English.
Niki Tantalou (M.A., 2002) has studied agreement with conjoined subjects in Greek. Her experimental studies identified elements of agreement resolution and partial agreement patterns that provide a challenge to several current accounts of how markedness and adjacency influence the calculation of agreement.
Carole Greber (visiting scholar, Ph.D., University of Geneva) and John Fischer (BA, 2004) both studied aspects of agreement planning in English using error elicitation paradigms.

Papers and Conference presentation(s):

Badecker, W., and F. Kuminiak. The role of the lexical item in processing agreement: Evidence from Slovak gender agreement. Status: manuscript under revision.

Kuminiak, F., and W. Badecker. 2000. Subject-Verb agreement errors after pseudo-plural heads. Presented to the Annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association (Baltimore, MD, March 23-25, 2000).

Greber, C., D. Vignati, A. Gildark, and W. Badecker. 2000. The processing of agreement and the role of lexical sources: The case of attraction from conjoined local noun phrases. Presented to the Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (San Diego, March 30-April 1, 2000).

Fischer, J., Kuminiak, F., Piorkowski. R., & Badecker, W. 2003. Producing Subject-verb Concord in Wh-Object Questions and Its Significance for Role-Flagging Models of Calculating Agreement On-line. Presented to the 16th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Cambridge, MA.

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Auditory Lexical Access
In this area, our research has focused on how phonological knowledge interacts with speech perception and lexical access. Important questions include:

How do listeners resolve the ambiguity created by regular phonological processes? For example, regressive place assimilation in English may result in a lexical competitor (Ex. ‘The dye turned the bean/m blue in color.’).
What role does phonology play in assigning a phonemic identity to the ambiguous segment?
Does phonological knowledge operate independently of lexical knowledge?
Do listeners use phonological knowledge to anticipate the identity of upcoming speech?

We are investigating these questions by testing listeners’ performance on lexical decision tasks using an auditory/visual cross-modal priming paradigm. Additionally, we are employing an eye tracker to investigate how listeners integrate auditory and visual information during lexical access.

Students
Rebecca Piorkowski is investigating how listeners resolve ambiguity created by regressive place assimilation in English using behavioral lexical decision data as well as data from an eye tracker, which is believed to accurately reflect the time course of lexical activation.

Conference presentation:

Piorkowski, R., & Badecker, W. 2004. Lexical effects on the perception of assimilated segments. Presented to the 45th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (Minneapolis, MN, November 18-21, 2004).

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Processing Lexical Morphology
In this area, our research has focused on the nature of the representation of words and affixes in the mental lexicon, and the processes by which we access and manipulate these representations. Important questions include:

Are affixed words stored as whole-word units, or as combinations of distinct morphological parts?
Are different classes of words and affixes stored and processed differently (inflectional vs. derivational, high-frequency vs. low-frequency, regular vs. irregular, more vs. less phonotactically "word-like", etc.), and what are these differences?
What steps are involved perceiving spoken or written words and accessing their meanings in the mental lexicon?

We typically investigate these questions by testing subjects' performance in a variety of spoken and written word comprehension tasks. Some of our recent collaborations have also allowed us to test our theories using direct brain measures like magnetoencephalograpy (MEG) and Event-Related neuro-electrical Potentials (ERP).

Students
Mark Allen (Ph.D, 2000) has investigated processing differences between irregular and regular morphology, and the different levels of representation of morphological knowledge, conducting experiments on Spanish and English processing of morphologically complex words in isolation and in sentence contexts.
Ehren Reilly is investigating the sources of surface-frequency and base-frequency effects on lexical access using behavioral lexical decision data as well as data from the MEG neuro-magnetic response component M350, which is believed to correspond to the spreading of lexical activation.

Selected Papers:

Allen, M., and W. Badecker. 1999. Stem homograph inhibition and stem allomorphy: Representing and processing inflected forms in a multi-level lexical system. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 105-123.

Allen, M., and W. Badecker. 2002. Inflectional regularity: Probing the nature of lexical representation in a cross-modal priming task. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 705-722.

Badecker, W., and M. Allen. 2002. Morphological parsing and the perception of lexical identity: A masked priming study of stem-homographs. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 125-144.

Allen, M., and W. Badecker. 2002. Stem-homographs and lemma level representations. Brain and Language, 81, 79-88.

Allen, M., Badecker, W., and Osterhout, L. 2003. Morphological analysis in sentence processing: An ERP study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 405-430.

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Syntactic, Semantic and Discourse Factors in Sentence Comprehension
Our work in sentence comprehension has addressed a range of issues, including:

How do syntactic constraints on coreference affect the early stages of pronoun and anaphor interpretation?
What types of lexical semantic information contribute to the initial commitments the parser makes to specific interpretations of ambiguous material?

Students
Oren Schwartz; Marina Todorova

Selected Papers and conference presentations:

Badecker, W., and K. Straub. 2002. The processing role of structural constraints on the interpretation of pronouns and anaphors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 28, 748-769.

Todorova, M., K. Straub, W. Badecker and R. Frank. 2000. Aspectual coercion and the on-line computation of sentential aspect. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Philadelphia, PA.
Schwartz, O., & Badecker, W. 2003. Implicit Causality and Pronominal Reference. Presented to the 44th Annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society (Vancouver, BC, Nov. 6-9, 2003).

Todorova, M., K. Straub, R. Frank, and W. Badecker. 2000. A study of the processing costs of aspectual coercion forced by durative modifiers. Presented to the Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (San Diego, March 30-April 1, 2000).

Todorova, M., K. Straub, R. Frank, and W. Badecker. 2000. Processing correlates of aspectual computation. Presented to the Workshop on Events and Paths, ESSLLI XII (Birmingham, England, August 6-10, 2000).

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Current Lab Members

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Lab Graduates and Research Collaborators

Participating in Experiments

If you are a Hopkins student and wish to participate in one of our experiments for credit, chech out the announcements on the Hopkins Experimetrix site. Opportunities for paid participation are posted outside the lab on a periodic basis.