Research in the Human Language Processing Lab

T. Florian Jaeger Professor, Brain and Cognitive Sciences; Computer Science; Linguistics, University of Rochester — June 6th, 2017

The ability to communicate abstract and complex thoughts enables us to transfer information across individuals and generations. In speech—the modality of primary interest to me—this is typically achieved at speeds of 2-3 words/second, requiring the planning and execution of many complex motor movements each second. How the human brain/mind manages robust message transfer at such speeds, despite the bounds defined by our cognitive, motor, and perceptual systems, is the central question behind my research. In pursuing this question, research in my lab is guided by the hypotheses that (i) one of the central goals of language use is communication, including the transfer of semantic, pragmatic, and social information, and (ii) the mechanisms and representations underling language processing (production and comprehension) are organized to achieve this and other goals efficiently.

This has let me to pursue a broad set of problems in the cognitive and language sciences. Here, I focus on a few of these lines of research that address different aspects in the communicative chain from message formulation to language understanding, and their joint effect on the development of language over historical time (for further information, see also the annotated list of references):

  1. Speech perception and adaptation (learning)

  2. Prediction and adaptation in sentence processing

  3. Communicative goals and adaptation in language production

  4. Linking processing to cross-linguistic diversity and generalization

  5. Statistical data analysis and method development

My approach to these questions is necessarily multidisciplinary: behavioral data from the lab or obtained from novel crowdsourcing paradigms inform our research, but so do cross-linguistics generalizations and diversity; advanced statistical methods allow us to test our theories even against highly heterogeneous and sparsely distributed data from conversational speech; computational models and mathematical theories help us understand both the problem space (rational analysis) and the possible consequences of goals, tasks, and perceptual and cognitive limitations.

Speech perception and adaptation

The mapping from the physical speech signal to linguistic categories (e.g., phonemes) is non-deterministic—due to motor, perceptual, and environmental noise. This makes speech perception a problem of inference under uncertainty: the optimal solution to such an inference problem is defined by ideal observer models (or Bayesian decision models once cognitive limitations, tasks, and goals are considered; for discussion, (Kuperberg and Jaeger, 2016)).

However, the non-deterministic mapping between the signal and linguistic categories is arguably not the most critical challenge to successful speech perception (e.g., ASR systems that only address this problem perform terribly). What makes speech recognition particularly difficult is that the speech signal is also subjectively non-stationary: the probabilistic mapping between signal and linguistic categories varies between contexts, including co-articulation due to phonological context and inter-talker differences. This has far reaching consequences: it means that an optimal solution to speech recognition requires inference, not only about linguistic categories, but also about the appropriate model (probabilistic mapping) for the current context. This constitutes the infamous lack of invariance problem in speech perception (Liberman et al., 1967). How then do we understand each other?

The answer seems to involve a number of mechanisms, ranging from low-level transformations of the signal that reduce inter-talker variability (“normalization”) to the learning and selection of talker-specific models (adaptation, for review, see [@WeatherholtzJaegerInPress]). One of our research foci is to understand the computational and cognitive systems that underlie the ability to flexibly adapt to changes in the statistics of the speech signal (funded through an NIH R01, 2013-2018). We have developed the ideal adapter framework (Kleinschmidt and Jaeger, 2015), an extension of ideal observers that addresses the non-stationarity/lack of invariance problem. We discuss how speech perception can navigate the continuum from recognition of familiar talkers, generalization based on previous experience with similar talkers, and adaptation to novel types of talkers. In this framework linguistic knowledge is organized ‘doubly-hierarchical’: in addition to the hierarchical predictive system of linguistic categories and the relations between them (e.g., syntax generating/constraining word sequences, words mapping to phonetic forms, etc.), there are social categories and relations (both more stable and dynamically created ones) that linguistic knowledge is conditioned on (and vice versa: social inferences are conditions on linguistic usage). This framework is shaping up to be rather influential, with over 70 citations one year after publication.

We have developed and tested Bayesian belief-updating models to test the ideal adapter’s predictions against the incremental effect of exposure to talkers with atypical pronunciations (e.g. (Kleinschmidt and Jaeger, 2011; Kleinschmidt and Jaeger, 2012; Kleinschmidt et al., 2015)). We have found that the ideal adapter can provide parsimonious accounts of otherwise puzzling properties of the speech perception system (e.g., Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2016b; Weatherholtz, Kleinschmidt, Seifeldin, Kurumada, & Jaeger, submitted). For example, in one line of research we have investigated the relation between selective adaptation and perceptual recalibration—two phenomena typically considered to be due to separate mechanisms. We found that the ideal adapter can account for both phenomena without requiring additional parameters or refitting. In another line of research, we are investigating whether speech adaptation involves automatic causal inference about alternative causes for atypical pronunciations, as predicted by the ideal adapter (Liu & Jaeger, submitted). This series of experiments suggest that, indeed, alternative causes are taken into account when inferring the talker-specific statistics used to interpret subsequent utterances of the same talker. This and other studies from my lab suggest that the systems underlying speech perception have ‘smart’ properties, well-suited for their purpose.

Our research on speech perception initially focused on adaptation to speech that differs in only one phonetic dimension from typical speech (e.g., shifted realization of voicing, unusual place of articulation, or atypical fricative pronunciation). However, in everyday life listeners often encounter pronunciations that are atypical on many dimension (sociolects, foreign accents). Understanding how adaptation under those circumstances relates to simpler shifts, and what the limits of such adaptation are, is thus critical. To this end, we have begun to investigate how speech perception changes as a function of incremental exposure to accented speech (e.g., Burchill, Liu, & Jaeger, submitted; Liu, Xie, Weatherholtz, & Jaeger, submitted; Weatherholtz et al., submitted). These studies have confirmed that speech perception is highly malleable with some changes occurring within one minute of exposure. This line of work is being extended in a multinational collaboration on the perception of regional varieties of English with sites in Australia (Sydney, Brisbane), New Zealand (Christchurch), and England (York, London, Newcastle).

Future research in my lab will seek to understand how listeners learn to generalize across groups of talkers, and how those generalizations are represented. For example, do the systems underlying speech perception induce structural generalization across talkers (as in hierarchical Bayesian models) or are generalizations based on ad-hoc inferences over context-rich memory representations (exemplar-based models)? Independent of how these generalization are represented, are they derived based on similarity across talkers and, if so, in what similarity space (for first steps in this direction, see Liu et al., submitted)?

As we continue to investigate the cognitive systems that underlie this remarkable human ability to adapt to variability in the speech signal, we will also have to address the limitations of these systems. Crucially, we will do so while guided by considerations about the (rational) consequences of uncertainty that listeners face about the appropriate model for the current speech input. In an initial set of studies, we have found that apparent limitations of our ability to adapt might, in fact, be a consequence of listeners’ implicit priors about how talkers differ from each other (Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2016a; see also Bicknell, Jaeger, & Tanenhaus, 2016; Burchill et al., submitted). In a recent perspective article, we have laid out how this approach can also explain many (but probably not all) known limitations of second language acquisition without any additional assumptions and even prior to assuming strong cognitive limitations (Pajak et al., 2016).

Finally, another important question regards the neural substrates of adaptation and generalization. For example, is adaptation based understood as high-level changes in decision criteria (affecting categorization) or is adaptation achieved through re-weighing of, for example, mixture of perceptual models in low-level cortical processing? Initial results favoring the latter view come from a recent collaboration with Raj Raizada’s fMRI lab (Kleinschmidt, Jaeger, & Raizada, 2016-SNL). Using a whole-brain searchlight analysis, we found that areas in the left supramarginal gyrus encode talker-specific information about phonetic contrasts after short exposure to novel talkers.

Prediction and adaptation beyond speech processing

We have extended similar investigations into domains of language processing beyond speech perception. Just as talkers differ in the statistics that maps phonological categories and words onto the speech stream, talkers and writers differ in their lexical and syntactic preferences. Language processing seems to draw (in whatever form) on implicit knowledge of these statistics (for research from my lab, see, e.g., (Kuperberg and Jaeger, 2016; Linzen and Jaeger, 2016)). One question is thus whether comprehenders adapt to, e.g., talker-specific, changes in lexical and syntactic distributions.

In a series of studies, we have found that comprehenders can quickly adjust the expectations based on the recently experienced distribution of lexical (Yildirim et al., 2013; Yildirim et al., 2016) or syntactic structures (e.g., Bushong & Jaeger, in prep; (Farmer et al., 2014; Fine et al., 2013)). For example, in classical garden-path experiments, in which participants are repeatedly exposed to a temporary ambiguity that causes processing difficulty, the garden path effect seems to be completely undone after about 25-36 sentences. This suggests that readers have adapted to the statistics of the experiment (in which garden-path sentences are more frequent than in everyday language, ). This work is receiving a fair amount of attention (with about 30 citations/year), and similar findings for, e.g., pragmatic and prosodic processing, are beginning to emerge from other labs. We have applied the same computational framework we have developed for phonetic adaptation to syntactic adaptation and found it to provide a good fit against these data as well, without further assumptions (Fine et al., 2010; Kleinschmidt et al., 2012).

We have also investigated the mechanisms that underlie such adaptation. Guided by the hypothesis that expectation adaptation serves to reduce the expected future prediction error, we predicted that the magnitude of change in expectation after seeing a structure depends on the prediction error encountered while processing the structure. Initial tests conducted both in my and other labs have found this prediction supported for both comprehension and production . This also holds the promise that a variety of phenomena often referred to as priming or alignment are a consequence of error-based learning (for related ideas, see F. Chang and Dell; for review, Fine & Jaeger, 2016).

In summary, we begin to see a processing system that is even more flexible than previously assumed. Research in the 80s and 90s uncovered that language processing seems to be exquisitely sensitive to the probabilistic structure of the language input (e.g., Altman; MacDonald; McClelland; Tanenhaus; Trueswell). Research in the 90s and 00s (re)linked this sensitivity to efficient processing in the presence of noise or under limited resources (Crocker; Jurafsky; Levy; Lewis; and work from my lab). Our research over the last handful of years suggests that these predictive mechanisms are subject to large degrees of short-term malleability, although many open question remain about the mechanisms and limits of these adaptive abilities.

Future and ongoing work in my lab thus continues to investigate linguistic adaptation at multiple levels of linguistic processing. How long-lasting are the changes we observe in the lab? What is the relation between short- to medium-term changes in expectations and long-term changes in representations? How do we generalize across talkers? How we generalize from very limited experience with a novel talker to predictions about what other linguistic features this speaker will exhibit? That is, how do we represent implicit knowledge about the covariance of different linguistic features, categories, and structures across talkers? This is a question that is just beginning to be explored. I believe that the hierarchical predictive frameworks that have guided our work so far will prove productive in addressing these questions. For example, we can conceptualize knowledge about generalizations across talkers in terms of priors over the covariance of linguistic features, categories, and structures. Preliminary work in my lab suggests that this view can point to a deeper understanding of how our linguistic knowledge is organized. We are, however, just completing the first steps in this research program.

Another open question we plan to address links our research to work in dialectology and sociolinguistics (see also Kleinschmidt, Weatherholtz, & Jaeger, in prep for TopiCS): are the same mechanisms we have found to be involved in adaptation to changes in the statistics of familiar structures, also explain how we learn novel structures? We have begun to investigate how novel syntactic structures are learned when comprehenders are first exposed to a speaker of another sociolect, dialect, or other variety of their native language (Fraundorf & Jaeger, 2016; Fraundorf, Jaeger, & Tanenhaus, in prep). We have found that listeners can rapidly integrate novel syntactic knowledge into the previous implicit knowledge about their native language: rather than to just have one mental grammar of our native language, it seems that we have a multitude of talker- and variety-specific ‘mini-grammars’. In collaboration with Scott Fraundorf at the University of Pittsburgh, I have submitted a grant proposal to NSF that aims to study the mechanisms of dialect learning. Specifically, we will ask how we learn novel dialects and how the novel knowledge is integrated with previous native language knowledge. This is one of several ongoing projects in which we draw on computational and psycholinguistic approaches to contribute to questions in sociolinguistics (see also Kleinschmidt, Weatherholtz, & Jaeger, in prep for TopiCS).

Finally, we have begun to tie our research on adaptation to distributional learning beyond language, including research on change point detection, adaptation at multiple time-scales, and learning of latent hierarchical structure over environments (for a recent perspective pieces, see (Qian et al., 2012)). This includes, in particular, questions about learning over sequentially presented data under non-stationary statistics. For example, we have employed computational frameworks similar to the ideal adapter to implicit motor learning during gaming (e.g., (Qian et al., 2016)). One intriguing outcome of this work has been that humans seem to be able to recognize previously induce latent statistical structure, even in the absence of overt cues. If confirmed, this raises interesting questions about model-free vs. model-based approaches to cognition, including debates in language acquisition (cf. traditional reinforcement learning vs. structure-inducing learners).

Communicative goals and adaptation in language production

Paralleling the research on language understanding, I have been deeply interested in the processes that allow us to encode thoughts into the sequence of motor commands that result in the acoustic input to comprehenders. This includes research on the basic mechanisms involved in linguistic encoding, such as grammatical (e.g., Butler, Bohnemeyer, & Jaeger, 2014, in prep; Gómez Gallo, Jaeger, & Smyth, 2008) and phonological encoding (e.g., Hilliard, Furth, & Jaeger, 2011; Jaeger, Furth, & Hilliard, 2012a, 2012b). The focus of my research, however, has been on the extent to which the mechanisms underlying linguistic encoding are organized to facilitate effective message transfer. This includes, in particular, questions about the extent to which different aspects of linguistic encoding are information encapsulated with regard to communicative goals, and the extent to which these systems are ‘smart’, despite being highly automatic.

The field of language production has sometimes been characterized by two diverging perspectives, language-as-action and language-as-product. Research in the latter perspective has focused on the mechanisms underlying linguistic encoding (e.g., Bock; Branigan; Ferreira). This perspective is often guided by the assumption that linguistic encoding is too complex to allow communicative goals to affect the very fast, and presumably automatic, encoding mechanisms that enable us to produce 2-3 words/second. The language-as-action view, in contrast, has less focused on mechanisms, instead putting the goals that guide language use into the foreground (e.g., Brennan; Brownschmidt; E. and H. Clark). Research in this tradition has, for example, shown that speakers dynamically adjust their utterances based on the social and visual context, their goals, etc.—suggesting an encoding architecture that is more interactive than predicted by models that focus purely on linguistic factors.

Much of my research on language production seeks to understand how the insights from these two traditions can be integrated. My approach to this question is guided by mathematical theories of communication, such as information theoretic considerations or ideal speaker models (extension of ideal observers that take into account the uncertainty speakers have about their listeners).

In my thesis, for example, I investigated one particular property that an efficient language code should have, uniform information density (cf. Shannon, 1948; Genzel & Charniak, 2003) . Transmitting information uniformly close to the channel capacity maximizes the amount of successfully transferred information per time. If language production is organized to facilitate efficient information transfer, speakers’ choices during language production should reflect a bias for uniform information density (Jaeger, 2006; Jaeger, 2010; Levy and Jaeger, 2007) To achieve more uniform information density, speakers should thus try to avoid peaks and troughs in the amount of information per linguistics signal (the hypothesis of uniform information density, or UID). One intuitive consequence of this hypothesis is that speakers should provide more informative linguistic signal for aspects of the linguistic message that are less expected (and hence less redundant).

In its most general form, this prediction is an old one, dating back to at least the early 20th (Zipf). Its derivation from first principles (information theory) began to enter the language sciences through phonetics in the early 00s, when researchers in phonetics observed that contextually predictable sounds, syllables, or words were produced with on average shorter duration and less acoustic detail (e.g., Aylett; Bell; Jurafsky; Pluymaekers; van Son). Work that grew out of my thesis—some of it in collaboration with Roger Levy—elaborated and generalized these ideas to other levels of language production. This has led me to test whether speakers’ implicit decision during linguistic encoding are biased to trade off message redundancy against the effort and time put into signal informativity, resulting in more uniform information density. This prediction has now received broad support both from production experiments and analyses of conversational speech, including studies on phonetic, lexical, syntactic, and discourse encoding (e.g., Degen & Jaeger, in prep; Frank & Jaeger, 2008; Gómez Gallo et al., 2008; Jaeger, 2006; Jaeger & Post, 2010; Jaeger, 2010b, 2011; Levy & Jaeger, 2007; Qian & Jaeger, 2009, 2012; Wasow, Jaeger, & Orr, 2011; see also work by, e.g., Gibson; Pate; Goldwater; Piantadosi; Tily).

How information density affects language production is now a topic of international interest, with an increasing number of workshops dedicated to this topic. In 2013 I was invited to participate in planning an application to an SFB (Germany’s largest grants) on Information density and linguistic encoding(Germany’s largest grants). Las year I gave a plenary lecture at the opening celebrations for this SFB, which now supports over 25 graduate and post-doctoral researchers.

However, as promising as this research on information density is, it does not allow us to directly address the inference mechanisms that seem to affect speakers’ decisions during linguistic encoding. Over recent years, I have therefore begun to develop and test an ideal speaker model cast in terms of rational inference over noisy input [@jaeger10iwolp; @Jaeger2013BBS; @Kurumada2015]. An ideal speakers’ decisions should balance production effort against the probability of successful communication. The ideal speaker model predicts the speakers should aim to reduce the contextual confusability of utterances, rather than just information density. Initial support for this model comes from our recent studies on word production (e.g., Buz & Jaeger, 2012-IWLP; Buz, Jaeger, & Tanenhaus, 2014; Buz & Jaeger, 2016; Buz, Tanenhaus, & Jaeger, 2016; Seyfarth, Buz, & Jaeger, 2016) and sentence production (e.g., Kurumada & Jaeger, 2015; Norcliffe & Jaeger, 2015). For example, we find that speaker hyper-articulate words (e.g., pin) when the context would make similar sounding words equally plausible candidates (e.g., bin). Further, if productions lead to misunderstandings, speakers increase the hyper-articulation on subsequent occasions, suggesting that speakers dynamically adapt their productions based on the perceived communicative success of previous utterances (for review, see also Jaeger, 2013; Jaeger & Buz, in press). These lines of research are funded by an NSF-IIS CAREER award (2012-2017).

Remarkably, these adaptations seem to involve inference over likely causes for previously experienced miscommunication: if the pronunciation of a particular segment is the likely cause for miscommunication, speakers subsequently hyper-articulate only that particular type of segment; if, however, miscommunication is more plausibly due to ambient noise in the environment, speakers hyper-articulate globally (e.g., by decreasing speech rate, Buz, Tanenhaus, & Jaeger, in prep). These results contrast with what continues to be an influential view, that the computational complexity of linguistic encoding requires encapsulation from communicative goals.

Future and ongoing work in my lab involve further investigations into the mechanisms that allow speakers to dynamically adapt their productions to the present contextual needs (as well as the limits of this ability and individual differences in it). Our research so far suggests that linguistic encoding—despite its inherent complexity —- is sensitive to communicative goals. This is reflected both in anticipatory adjustments to speech (such as hyper-articulation in contexts that are expected to lead to increased confusability) and learning from past communicative failures. One important question thus is what type of cognitive architecture can accommodate both types of behavior.

Our findings also raise questions about why some previous studies have found strong limitations in speakers’ ability to anticipatory adapt their speech. Crucially, most of this previous work has failed to take into account the fact that speakers typically need to infer the best course of action, and that these inferences take place under uncertainty (e.g., about the audience’s state of knowledge). Future investigations into the limits of these systems should thus take this uncertainty into account, when reasoning about rational production decisions. This line of research opens interesting connections to related work in computational pragmatics (e.g., Rational Speech Act and game-theoretic models, Goodman; Frank; Francke; Jäger) and computational models of teaching (cf. ideal teacher models, Shafto). Finally, the ideas outlined in this section are also beginning to affect work beyond psycholinguistics. For example, recent work has found that text generations systems that aim for uniform information density are rated as better by human readers (e.g., Rajkumar & White, 2011, and others).

Linking processing to cross-linguistic diversity and generalization

There is now considerable correlational evidence that the languages across the world exhibit phonological and lexical properties that are expected if language is shaped by how we use it for communication (including some cross-linguistic research from my lab, Graff & Jaeger, 2009; Qian & Jaeger, 2012). In a study under review, my colleague Dan Gildea and I have been exploring if even the most latent aspects of grammatical systems—such as the rules or constraints that govern word order—are subject to similar biases. Using large syntactically annotated databases, we compare actual grammars against plausible theoretically possible grammars. We found that all languages in our sample exhibited word order patterns that made them easier to process than expected by chance (specifically, they had shorter dependencies and information density in bits/word than expected by chance, Gildea & Jaeger, submitted). In fact, several of the languages exhibited word orders with close to optimal processing efficiency. Interestingly, our approach also reveals that languages that are efficient to process tend to exhibit certain properties that are often considered to be examples of (implicational) universals (such as certain headedness-harmonies). At the same time, our approach correctly predicts these universals to not be categorical. The computational approach we have been pursuing to this question thus holds the potential to account for both cross-linguistic generalizations and diversity based on well-established properties of human information processing (such as a bias against high information density and dependency lengths). This is a question I will continue to pursue. An ongoing collaboration with Rajmukar Rajakrishnan (at IIT, Delhi), for example, explores related questions for languages of the Indian subcontinent.

If, as this work suggests, typological distributions indeed reflect the same principles that affect language processing this raises questions as to how these biases enter the lexicon and grammar over generations. One possibility is that the adaptation processes described above change adults’ linguistic representations throughout life (cf., Buz et al., 2016; Weatherholtz, Campbell-Kibler, & Jaeger, 2014). Another, mutually compatible, possibility is that these biases operate during language acquisition, causing language learners to deviate from the input they receive, leading to languages better suited for information transfer (among other cognitive constraints on language processing). Research in my lab has begun to address this question in two lines of collaborations (e.g., Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport, 2012; Fedzechkina, Trueswell, & Jaeger, 2015; Fedzechkina, Newport, & Jaeger, 2016; Fedzechkina, Chu, & Jaeger, submitted; Tily, Frank, & Jaeger, 2011; for an overview, see Tily & Jaeger, 2011). For example, in one series of experiments we exposed language learners to miniature artificial languages with learned over the course of several days (Fedzechkina et al., 2012). These languages contain word order variation and optional case-marking, similar to those we have previously investigated in Japanese. Unlike Japanese, however, these artificial languages were designed to employ case-marking inefficiently. Participants learned to understand these languages with high accuracy. In their own productions, however, they restructured the language so as to lead to more robust information transfer (i.e., they use case-marking when the intended grammatical function assignment is unexpected in the current context). To the best of my knowledge, this is the first direct evidence that language learning is biased towards language codes (grammars) that facilitate efficient information transfer.

I am also involved in several ongoing projects that extend the framework of the ideal speaker model to traditional approaches to grammar. For example, in Hume, Hall, Jaeger, and Wedel (2016), we are developing a Bayesian approach to phonology (including, e.g., epenthesis, mergers). In another project, I am investigating to what extent certain argument-structure constraints can be reduced to the principles underlying the ideal speaker model (Grimshaw and Jaeger, 2013, in prep). Our first round of experiments found that even near-categorical or categorical semantic constraints on complementizer omission (e.g., the unacceptability of that-omission for manner of speech verbs, “He bitched *(that) they had been awful”) are more accurately predicted by the ideal speaker model, compared to traditional semanto-syntactic constraints. Put differently, the principles underlying the ideal speaker seem to be the source of what is developing into (near-)categorical semantic constraints on complement clauses in English. These results serve to demonstrate that generative linguistics, too, can benefit from taking into account the mechanisms that underlie language processing (see also Hofmeister, Jaeger, Arnon, Ivan, & Snider, 2013; Jaeger & Norcliffe, 2009; Norcliffe, Harris, & Jaeger, 2016).

Statistical data analysis and other methodological contributions

Above I have focused on the theoretical aspects of my work. This leaves aside another aspect of my work I consider critical and that I try to instill in my students: scientific rigor (though not meant to replace common sense) and contributions to method development. This is reflected in a strong focus on advanced methods for data analysis (e.g., Frank, Salverda, Jaeger, & Tanenhaus, 2009-CUNY; Jaeger, 2008; Jaeger, Graff, Croft, & Pontillo, 2011; Croft, Bhattacharya, Kleinschmidt, Smith, & Jaeger, 2011; Jaeger, Pontillo, & Graff, 2012; Tanenhaus, Frank, Jaeger, Masharov, & Salverda, 2008-CUNY, Winter & Jaeger, in prep), corpus-based research on conversational speech (e.g., Degen & Jaeger, 2010; Jaeger, 2011), methods for efficient data collection (e.g., via crowdsourcing, e.g., Buz et al., 2014; Seyfarth et al., 2016; Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2012b; Tily et al., 2011), and field-based methods (Bohnemeyer, Butler, & Jaeger, in press; Butler et al., 2014, in prep; Norcliffe & Jaeger, 2015, as part of NSF-BCS award Collaborative Research: Studying Language Production in the Field, 2009-2011, together with J. Bohnemeyer). This includes, for example, elaborate simulated communication paradigms that allows us to (mis)lead participants over the web into believing that they are talking to a partner. To the best of my knowledge, research from my lab is the first to successfully use such paradigms to study even fine-grained phonetic aspects in speech perception and production. I plan to continue to advance these methods, likely in collaboration with experts in human-computer interaction.

References

  1. Kuperberg, G.N., Jaeger, T.F., 2016. What do we mean by prediction in sentence processing? Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience 31, 32–59. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2015.1102299

    Keywords: Language comprehension, prediction error, generative model, probabilistic, surprisal

    DOI
  2. Liberman, A.M., Cooper, F.S., Shankweiler, D.P., Studdert-Kennedy, M., 1967. Perception of the speech code. Psychological Review 74, 431–461. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0020279
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  3. Kleinschmidt, D.F., Jaeger, T.F., 2015. Robust speech perception: Recognizing the familiar, generalizing to the similar, and adapting to the novel. Psychological Review 122, 148–203. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0038695
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  4. Kleinschmidt, D., Jaeger, T.F., 2011. A Bayesian belief updating model of phonetic recalibration and selective adaptation, in: ACL Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics. Portland, OR.
    Paper
  5. Kleinschmidt, D.F., Jaeger, T.F., 2012. A continuum of phonetic adaptation: Evaluating an incremental belief-updating model of recalibration and selective adaptation, in: Miyake, N., Peebles, D., Cooper, R.P. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society, Sapporo, Japan.

    Keywords: adaptation,bayesian model-,cue combination,ing,rational analysis,sentence processing

    Paper
  6. Kleinschmidt, D.F., Raizada, R., Jaeger, T.F., 2015. Supervised and unsupervised learning in phonetic adaptation, in: Dale, R., Jennings, C., Maglio, P., Matlock, T., Noelle, D., Warlaumont, A., Yoshimi, J. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society, Austin, TX, pp. 1129–1134.
  7. Pajak, B., Fine, A.B., Kleinschmidt, D.F., Jaeger, T.F., 2016. Learning additional languages as hierarchical inference: Insights from L1 processing. Language Learning 66, 900–944. https://doi.org/10.1111/lang.12168

    Keywords: second language acquisition, hierarchical probabilistic inference, statistical learning, speech adaptation

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  8. Linzen, T., Jaeger, T.F., 2016. Uncertainty and Expectation in Sentence Processing: Evidence From Subcategorization Distributions. Cognitive Science 40, 1382–1411. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12274

    Keywords: Sentence processing; Uncertainty; Prediction; Entropy reduction; Surprisal; Competition

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  9. Yildirim, I., Degen, J., Tanenhaus, M.K., Jaeger, T.F., 2013. Linguistic Variability and Adaptation in Quantifier Meanings, in: The 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci13). Berlin, Germany.
    Paper
  10. Yildirim, I., Degen, J., Tanenhaus, M.K., Jaeger, T.F., 2016. Talker-specificity and adaptation in quantifier interpretation. Journal of Memory and Language 87, 128–143. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.08.003

    Keywords: Adaptation; Talker-specificity; Quantifiers; Semantics; Pragmatics

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  11. Farmer, T.A., Fine, A.B., Yan, S., Cheimariou, S., Jaeger, T.F., 2014. Error-Driven Adaptation of Higher-Level Expectations During Natural Reading, in: Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci14). Austin, TX : Cognitive Science Society, pp. 2181–2186.
  12. Fine, A.B., Jaeger, T.F., Farmer, T., Qian, T., 2013. Rapid Expectation Adaptation During Syntactic Comprehension. PLoS ONE 8. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0077661
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  13. Fine, A., Qian, T., Jaeger, T.F., Jacobs, R., 2010. Is there syntactic adaptation in language comprehension?, in: Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics. Uppsala, Sweden.
    Paper
  14. Kleinschmidt, D.F., Fine, A.B., Jaeger, T.F., 2012. A belief-updating model of adaptation and cue combination in syntactic comprehension, in: Miyake, N., Peebles, D., Cooper, R.P. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Cognitive Science Society, Sapporo, Japan.

    Keywords: adaptation,bayesian modeling,cue combination,rational analysis,sentence processing

    Paper
  15. Qian, T., Jaeger, T.F., Aslin, R.N., 2012. Learning to Represent a Multi-Context Environment: More than Detecting Changes. Frontiers in Psychology 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00228
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  16. Qian, T., Jaeger, T.F., Aslin, R.N., 2016. Incremental implicit learning of bundles of statistical patterns. Cognition 157, 156–173. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2016.09.002
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  17. Jaeger, T.F., 2006. Redundancy and Syntactic Reduction in Spontaneous Speech (PhD thesis). Stanford University.
  18. Jaeger, T.F., 2010. Redundancy and Reduction: Speakers Manage Information Density. Cognitive Psychology 61, 23–62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2010.02.002

    Keywords: Efficient language production; Rational cognition; Syntactic production; Syntactic reduction; Complementizer that-mentioning

    DOI
  19. Levy, R., Jaeger, T.F., 2007. Speakers optimize information density through syntactic reduction, in: Schölkopf, B., Platt, J., Hoffman, T. (Eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 849–856.
    Paper