Faculty
T. Florian Jaegerfjaeger@bcs.rochester.edu[personal homepage]
I am interested in how production and comprehension complexity (due to locality; expectation) influences speakers' choice in language variation. I use psycholinguistic experimentation and corpus-based statistical modeling to investigate whether/to what extent speakers use prosodic and syntactic cues to make unexpected information easier to process (predictability; information structure; common ground), and to which extend this is done for their addressees (audience design). For more see my CV.

Postdocs
Lindsay Butler (BCS)lkbutler@email.arizona.edu[personal homepage]
The major objective of my research is to investigate the relationship between structure and meaning in language, especially with respect to understudied, non-Indo-European languages, like Yucatec Maya (Mayan; Mexico), Shiwilu (Kawapanan; Peru) and Aghem (Grassfields Bantu; Cameroon). I am currently involved in the field-based psycholinguistics project on sentence production in Yucatec Maya. In this project, we are using language production tasks to investigate the factors that affect word order variation.
Thomas Farmer (BCS)tfarmer@bcs.rochester.edu[personal homepage]
Broadly construed, my research spans a series of topics across the field of cognitive science, although my primary research area is in the domain of on-line language processing. To that end, using an array of behavioral and psychophysiological measures, I conduct research in three separate yet related areas: 1) interaction between linguistic and motor systems, 2) phonological contributions to natural reading and syntactic processing, and 3) the mechanisms that contribute to the learning of speech sound categories in L2.
Jenny Roche (BCS)jroche@bcs.rochester.edu[personal homepage]
I am currently interested in interactive communicative behavior during dialogue. My research background has involved varying levels of speech production, from the low-level analysis of affective speech to higher-levels of analysis of language production during dialogue. My most recent projects have included studies involving the production, perception and action on the interpretation of intent (e.g., via affective prosody) and cues to communication breakdown during interactive communication (e.g., alignment and disambiguation during dialogue). Currently, I am exploring other facets of interactive language that involve comprehension and production, as it is influenced by higher-level social factors (e.g., talker specific characteristics).

Grad students
Esteban Buz (BCS)ebuz@bcs.rochester.edu[personal homepage]
My interests are in grammatical structure, its processing, variation and changes over time. My current focus is on how changes over time are, in part, a reflection of acquisition and processing biases. I also have an interest in why and how variation within and across languages is influenced by these same biases.
Judith Degen (BCS)jdegen@bcs.rochester.edu[personal homepage]
My research investigates phenomena at the semantics/pragmatics interface. My current focus lies on the processing of scalar implicatures, but I am more generally interested in how speakers and hearers make use of information about the discourse context - especially of each others' intentional states - in comprehension and production. My work combines behavioral, corpus, and formal linguistic methods.
Maryia Fedzechkina (BCS)mashaf@bcs.rochester.edu[personal homepage]
I am interested in the role of processing preferences in language acquisition. I use a combination of computational and behavioral methods to investigate the extent to which processing biases affect language acquisition.
Alex Fine (BCS, Ling)afine@bcs.rochester.edu[personal homepage]
My interests center on computational and mechanistic theories of language processing, with a current focus on syntactic comprehension. Ongoing and recent work focuses on the following questions:
  1. Humans deploy a range of probabilistic cues during language comprehension in order to efficiently process linguistic input. However, given the variability in the input, a question that arises is how humans adapt to changes in the probability distributions comprising their experience with language. I'm interested in finding out what computational principles and cognitive mechanisms underlie linguistic adaptation.
  2. Relatedly, I am interested in how humans combine multiple sources of probabilistic information to quickly and accurately infer intended messages. To this end, I am currently exploring the hypothesis that humans combine cues rationally (in the sense of Anderson, 1990) by weighting probabilistic cues according to their reliability.
Dave Kleinschmidt (BCS)dkleinschmidt@bcs.rochester.edu[personal homepage]
I'm interested in computational modeling and speech perception, and specifically in developing models of how phonetic categories are learned and deployed that are plausible from linguistic, computational, neural, and developmental perspectives. I'm also interested in how phonetic categories interact with lexical representations.
Ting Qian (BCS)ting.qian@rochester.edu[personal homepage]
The big question that underlies my research interest is: can all phenomena of language use be explained by a rational account? If not, what may explain the “irrational” decisions that speakers/listeners make? This includes investigations of at least the following three questions:
  • What aspects of human language use can be explained as rational choices? (e.g. lexical, syntactic choices)
  • What happens when speakers/listeners make a seemingly irrational decision?
  • Presumably human speakers are rational in general, but are they equally rational? (e.g. should a difference in rationality be accountable for difference in linguistic performance between 1st and 2nd language users?)
I mainly use computational methods to build language models and perform simulations, and regression methods to analyze resulting data.