What type of research do we do?
In the Human Language Processing Laboratory (HLP Lab) at the University of Rochester, we are interested in how language users integrate information rapidly and reliably online.
In production, we investigate how speakers plan their utterances and to what extent decision during incremental language production are guided by general computational principles (such as the uniform distribution of information over time or over planning units to minimize comprehension effort and to maximize information transfer; or efficient use of limited resources such as syntactic working memory). We investigate these decisions at many levels of linguistic representation, including phonological, morphological, and grammatical encoding; decision about speech rate at the lowest level of production; decisions about referential expressions (pronominalization; ellipsis); and decisions as to how to structure a discourse at higher levels of production.
In comprehension, we are interested in similar computational principles. Building on work over the last decades that has shown that comprehenders almost instantaneously integrate evidence from multiple information sources, we investigate to what extent parsing makes optimal use of available information. How is top-down and bottom-up evidence integrated in comprehension? Are all source of information weighted according to how reliable and available they are or are there differences in the influence and time course between different information sources that are incompatible with the strongest version of ideal observer models of comprehension. When we observe such deviations from optimality (for which there arguably already is some evidence) where and when do they occur?
While many of our current interests are guided by computational hypotheses (Uniform Information Density, Ideal Observers), we ultimately need to link those computational models to cognitive mechanism. Some apparent counter-evidence to optimal production and comprehension models (e.g. the fact that reduction, such as shortening or word omission, at different levels of production seems to be affected by different information) may actually support the hypothesis that language processing is a rational system once we consider what information is available to what mechanism of language processing.
In our research, we use both behavioral experiments and corpus modeling (mostly using richly annotated spontaneous speech corpora). This allows us to combine methods that give us a lot of control over the situation in which participants produce or comprehend language with models of naturally distributed data.
Learn more
You can listen to and watch the following talk summarizing some of our work on efficiency in language production (given in April 2010 at Rutgers. Thanks to Chris Kourtev and Andrew Watts for preparing the flash movie). [Video]
A list of ongoing projects can be found in our lab wiki, and our publication page contains presentations and papers about previous projects. In case you're interested in our work, but do not have a background in psycholinguistics, here are some handbook references that may get you started:
- For an introduction to language production:
- Bock, K. and Levelt, W. (1994). Language production. In Gernsbacher, M. A., editor, Handbook of Psycholinguistics, chapter 29, pages 945–984. Academic Press, first edition.
- Ferreira, V. and Slevc, L. (2007). Grammatical encoding. The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics, chapter 27, pages 453–469. Oxford University Press.
- Griffin, Z. M. and Ferreira, V. S. (2006). Properties of spoken language production. In Traxler, M. and Gernsbacher, M. A., editors, Handbook of Psycholinguistics, chapter 2, pages 21–59. Academic Press, second edition.
- For an introduction to sentence comprehension:
- Pickering, M. J. and van Gompel, R. P. G. (2006). Syntactic parsing. In Traxler, M. and Gernsbacher, M. A., editors, Handbook of Psycholinguistics, chapter 12, pages 455–504. Academic Press, second edition.
- A brief overview of research on processing complexity in comprehension and production
- Jaeger, T.F. and Tily, H. (2010). On Language ‘Utility’: Processing Complexity and Communicative Efficiency. WIRE: Cognitive Science.
- For a very quick introduction to probability theory and information theory as relevant to language research:
- Jurafsky, D. and Martin, J. H. (2008). Speech and Language Processing. Prentice Hall, second edition.
- Manning, C. D. and Schuetze, H. (1999). Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, chapter 3. Mathematical Foundations, pages 39–80. MIT Press, first edition.
