Psycholinguistic Research

Much of my research has been concerned with how lexical, semantic, and discourse information can be integrated during language comprehension. The resolution of semantic and syntactic ambiguity has played a central role in the debate about the structure of the language comprehension system because of the special problems that it poses for the efficient functioning of the language processor. Our current research investigates how various factors contribute to potential reading problems when ambiguity is encountered. These efforts have utilized data from experiments with human subjects and also from computer simulations of language comprehension.

A major  research effort is our work at modeling the semantic system. The Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL) model has been the focus of this research whick is summarized on its own page.We have investigated a broad range of memory and language phenomena using the model in conjunction with empirical research with human subjects.

See the lab reprints page for abstracts of our work.