My research is focused on the psychology of language, and particularly on two related questions: (1) how do humans so easily resolve lexical and syntactic ambiguity in language, and (2) why do computer systems have tremendous difficulty with these ambiguities?
My research investigates the resolution of ambiguity at all levels of the language comprehension system using many different methodologies. My early work looked at the processes involved in retrieving meanings of ambiguous words from memory and the role of attention and cerebral hemispheric specialization. More recently, my work has included how we understand sentences that are syntactically ambiguous. This research includes the role of the context in which the sentence occurs, as well as the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in this process. Other work involves the understanding of metaphor and idioms. I use both normal and brain-damaged subjects in my work. What I learns with human cognitive performance, I apply to the development of neural-network style computer simulations of language and memory function. My ultimate goal is to get computers to "understand" language. My lab includes a state-of-the-art infrared eye-tracking apparatus for neuropsychological and reading research and high-speed networked computer systems for artificial intelligence work.
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