Coreference & Forms of Co-referring expressions
A key part of what makes language coherent is the fact that speakers and writers refer back to things that they’ve already mentioned. If you’ve been talking about a hawk, for example, you can simply say “it” to refer to it, or perhaps something more descriptive like “the bird”. Words like “it” and “the bird” are called anaphors, and the thing they refer to (such as the hawk) is called an antecedent.
As readers and listeners – how do we know what words like “it” and “they” refer to – how and when do we determine the antecedent, and what kinds of information do we use to make that connection? For phrases like “the bird” – how and when do we decide that this refers to some previously mentioned bird or a completely new one?
We are conducting experiments to address questions like these, and to figure out what role context plays in determining when and how coreference is established while we read. We are currently focusing on the role of anaphor specificity and the presence of potential alternative antecedents.
Processing Information structure
Language offers speakers a numbers of different ways to say the same thing – if you want to express the idea that a mailman chased a dog, you could say it any number of ways, including:
A mailman chased a dog.
A dog was chased by a mailman.
It was a mailman that chased a dog.
What chased the dog was the a mailman.
These different structures mark the information in the sentence as either already known and under discussion (called the topic) or previously unknown called the focus). There are currently several projects underway in the lab that cover the following topics related to information structure, including:
Understanding why readers and listeners have poor comprehension for sentence with usual word orders (and whether context can help)
Comprehension and Processing of Non-Canonical word orders
Eye-tracking and production study of scrambling in Korean (PhD dissertation research by Sangyeon Park)
Project examining comprehension and eye-tracking measures of reading of sentences with simple, but non-canonical structures
Influence of alternative focus set members on focus processing
Adult Readers with DyslexiA
How do adult readers with dyslexia read and take in other visual information? This is a new area of research in the lab, with a project currently underway that compares how typical and dyslexic readers take in information from different types of graphs (PhD dissertation research by Sunjung Kim)
Processing counterfactualS
(PhD dissertation research by Laura Dawidziuk)
Noun-Verb agreement in Persian
(PhD dissertation research by Aazam Fiez)
See our recent poster from CUNY 2012
Second Language Acquisition
There is currently a project underway by Maria Fionda, who is finishing research in this area for her PhD.
A new project is under development in collaboration with researchers at UF and at Utrecht University.