Psycholinguistics

My dissertation research was in the field of Psycholinguistics (the psychology of language). Psycholinguistics covers a very wide range of topics in language acquisition/development; language production at the level of discourse, sentences, words, and sounds; language comprehension at these levels; and disordered speech and language in children and adults. Broadly, I study the cognitive processes behind language production in adults. Some topics that I am particularly interested in are described below.

Semantic Integration

Semantic integration is the degree of conceptual relatedness between two components of an utterance. This type of relationship can arise from the natural world, such as the functional relationship between a key and a lock, or it can arise from language. For example, while the phrase the bracelet made of silver is being planned, the words made of create a tight conceptual link between bracelet and silver. This type of relationship could extend to an unlikely pairing as well, such as the bracelet made of graphite. The words made of do the work of integrating two utterance components. Semantic integration has been shown to influence grammatical encoding, particularly subject–verb agreement and word-order determination processes. My research on this topic has provided evidence that semantic integration effects arise during the functional level of grammatical encoding, where words are selected and assigned to their roles in an utterance.

Syntactic Similarity

Similarity phenomena have been extensively studied in psychology, resulting in well-developed theories about what kinds of similarity people evaluate and how, and what kinds of similarity have a role in cognitive functions. I am interested in the similarity between parts of an utterance that is being planned. I am currently conducting research intended to determine if the similarity of utterance constituents affects the ordering of these constituents during production. This research also aims to determine what kinds of linguistic similarity are evaluated during grammatical encoding: syntactic or semantic.

Lexical Selection

When we produce utterances, we select words from the mental lexicon and order them for production according to the rules of our language. For simple English phrases such as the purple dress, two content words (one adjective and one noun) must be selected. I am interested in the order in which these content words are selected, and in whether or not the selection order reflects the ultimate order of the utterance (adjective-first, in English) or conceptual/linguistic forces (e.g., noun-first selection, as the syntactic head or conceptually most important component of the phrase). This line of research employs the picture–word interference paradigm with semantically related, phonologically related, and unrelated distractors, which addresses a secondary purpose of investigating the semantic and phonological relationships between English words, and their effects on production latencies.