Scholarship

Processing Linguistic Meaning

My research focuses on adult language comprehension. The act of comprehending a sentence usually feels effortless and simple. However, it is not uncommon for comprehenders to make mistakes they aren’t aware of. One common cause of this kind of mistake is that comprehenders sometimes leave words or even syntactic structures underspecified (e.g., Patson, Darowski, Moon, & Ferreira, 2009). For example, someone who read “this work fills an important gap in the literature” as indicating that the work is important, would have committed this kind of error. This interpretation follows from a shallow reading that combines the related and expected concepts of importance, work, and filling gaps, but fails to specify the crucial relationship between “important” and “gap”. I am interested in what factors contribute to when and how often sentence comprehenders leave information underspecified, leading to these kinds of errors. My work is informed by formal linguistics as well as cognitive psychology.

My research has focused on the conceptual representation of plurals. For example, consider the sentence The cats slept on the rug. When a comprehender hears this sentence what conceptual representation is built for “cats”? The plural referent cats could be left underspecified and represented as a single, non-differentiated group or it could be fully specified and thus represented as a set of differentiated cats. This question is important because if plurals are left underspecified, this could have implications for future processing. For example, if later the individuals in the plural need to be accessed, comprehension may slow down in order to individuate the entities in the plural, if it had not been previously done.

Here are a few representative papers. If you would like a copy of any of my papers, please send me an email and I be happy to provide you with one.

Broadening Interest in Science

In addition to my work on plurals, I am also interested in questions addressing broadening interest in science. To that end, I have written about the implications of implementing inquiry-based teaching methods into Linguistics and Psychology courses.

Additionally, Laura Wagner and I were awarded a grant from the NSF entitled Promoting Science Understanding and Interest through Language Science. The project focuses on the scientific study of language and investigates the utility of using language science as a a means to create excitement about science as a practice and to broaden understanding and interest in science, especially among individuals who do not identify with traditional science fields.

The Language Pod

Much of my research is conducted in the Language Pod at the Center for Science and Industry (COSI) in Columbus, Ohio. The Pod is dedicated to the study of language and t he dissemination of knowledge about language sciences. If you are interested in learning more about our work, or doing language science outreach yourself, visit our website.