Course Description

Psycholinguistics:

Language as Product and Language as Action

Fernanda Ferreira

Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science Program

Michigan State University

East Lansing, MI 48824-1117 USA

Traditional psycholinguistic approaches to language comprehension have emphasized the computation of formal linguistic structures and have assumed that full and complete representations are routinely built. Recently, this view has been challenged by those who believe that the study of language processing could benefit from adopting a more ecological and situated approach to theorizing and experimentation. This course will provide a brief overview of this evolution in psycholinguistics. We will begin with traditional models from the language-as-product tradition (Days 1 and 2). Then we will progress to considering the nature of the mistakes people routinely make during interpretation (Day 3), the effects of disfluencies on parsing and comprehension (Day 4), and the way that considerations from dialogue should constraint theorizing in both language understanding and generation (Day 5).

Day 1: Basic parsing

Required Reading:

MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg (1994). The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution. Psychological Review, 101, 676-703.

Optional Readings:

Fodor, & Inoue (1998). Attach anyway. In J.D. Fodor & F. Ferreira (Eds.), Reanalysis in human sentence processing (pp. 101-142). Kluwer.

van Gompel, R., Pickering, M.J., and Traxler, M.J. (2001). Reanalysis in Sentence Processing: Evidence against Current Constraint-Based and Two-Stage Models. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 225-258.

Day 2: Semantics during parsing

Required Reading:

Clifton, C.E. et al. (2003). The use of thematic role information in parsing: Syntactic processing autonomy revisited. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 317–334

Optional Reading:

Sedivy, J. (2002). Invoking discourse-based contrast sets and resolving syntactic ambiguities. Journal of Memory and Language, 46, 341-370.

Day 3: Misinterpretations in language comprehension

Required Reading:

Christianson, K., Hollingworth, A., Halliwell, J., & Ferreira, F. (2001). Thematic roles assigned along the garden path linger. Cognitive Psychology, 42, 368-407.

Optional Reading:

Ferreira, F. (2003). The misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 47, 164-203.

Day 4: Disfluencies in language comprehension

Required Reading:

Ferreira, F., & Bailey, K.D.G. (2004). Disfluencies in human language comprehension. Trends in Cognitive Science, 8, 231-237.

Optional Reading:

Bailey, K.G.B , & Ferreira, F. (2003). Disfluencies influence syntactic parsing. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 183-200.

Day 5: Psycholinguistics of Dialogue

Required Readings:

Pickering, M., & Garrod, S. (in press). Towards a mechanistic theory of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Optional Reading:

Hanna, J., Tanenhaus, M.K., & Trueswell, J. (2003). The effects of common ground and perspective on domains of referential interpretation. Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 43-61.

Fernanda Ferreira

Fernanda Ferreira was born in Minho, Portugal and raised in Winnipeg, Canada. She did her Ph.D. work at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with Charles Clifton and Lyn Frazier, graduating in 1988. In 1992 she accepted a position at Michigan State University, where she remains. Her earliest publications focused on the modularity of syntactic parsing as well as the generation of prosodic representations during language production. Her work later expanded to include the topic of reanalysis, where in collaboration with Janet D. Fodor and John M. Henderson she has tried to describe how the parser recovers from a syntactic garden-path. More recently she has attempted to expand the coverage of psycholinguistics by considering a topic that has heretofore received little attention: the processing of disfluencies during comprehension. In addition, her work examines the interface between language and vision, and she also does research on grammatical encoding in language production. She currently serves as Associate Editor of Journal of Memory and Language and a member of the National Institutes of Health Study Section on Language and Communicative Disorders. In 1996 she received the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology (Cognition and Human Learning).