UMass Eyetracking Lab

Three posters featuring work from our lab will be at this year’s CUNY Conference at the University of Colorado Boulder:

• Mayer, E., Dillon, B., & Staub, A. The (non-)influence of even’s likelihood-based presupposition on lexical predictability effects.  
• Burnsky, J., & Staub, A. Cloze completions reveal misinterpretation of noncanonical sentences.  
• Sloggett, S., Rysling, A., & Staub, A. Linguistic focus as predictive attention allocation.  

In addition, two outstanding undergraduate honors students will be presenting their thesis work at the Massachusetts Undergraduate Research Conference:

• Serene Elbach, ERPs Related to Word Skipping: An Analysis Using Coregistration of EEG and Eye Movements
• Laurel Whitfield, Syntactic Processing in Beginning Readers:  Evidence from Eye Movements

Laurel is also the recipient of the Research Assistant Appreciation Award, which is a competitive award given each year to an outstanding senior in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences!

Finally, the lab will be very well represented in June at Psycholinguistics in Iceland: Parsing and Prediction, where Jon Burnsky, Erika Mayer, and Bojana Ristic are all giving talks, and where Adrian is a keynote speaker.

It’s been a busy spring!

Some new folks are joining the lab this Fall:  Kuan-Jung Huang, a new PhD student, and Bojana Ristic, a visiting grad student from BCBL.  Welcome, Kuan-Jung and Bojana!

Several new papers from the lab, on a disparate set of topics, are now in press. Requests for reprints are welcome.

One presents data from Lap-Ching Keung’s Masters Thesis on agreement with coordinate subjects:

• Keung, L., & Staub, A. (2018).  Variable agreement with coordinate subjects is not a form of agreement attraction.  Journal of Memory and Language, 103, 1-18.

Another reports an experiment carried out by Sophia Dodge as part of an independent study, where we find that readers often fail to report a ‘the the’ sequence even when they directly fixate both instances of ‘the’!

• Staub, A., Dodge, S., & Cohen. A. (in press).  Failure to notice function word repetitions and omissions in reading:  Are eye movements to blame?  Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.

A third reports experiments showing that invalid parafoveal preview eliminates the standard predictability effect on early reading time measures.  I’ve talked about this work at the CUNY conference, Psychonomics, and elsewhere.

• Staub, A., & Goddard, K. (in press).  The role of preview validity in predictability and frequency effects on eye movements in reading.  Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

We’re saying goodbye this summer to a crew of excellent undergraduate RAs.  Sophia Dodge will be entering the PhD program in School Psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.  Kirk Goddard will be entering the Masters program in the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastian, Spain.  Congratulations, Sophia and Kirk!

This Fall we’ll also be welcoming back some fantastic continuing undergrad RAs (Audrey O’Neill and Laurel Whitfield) and welcoming some new ones (Serene Elbach and Marcos Coli).

We’re also excited to welcome Jon Burnsky, who will be starting in the lab this Fall as a new PhD student.  Jon comes from the University of Maryland, where he worked as a Research Assistant with Colin Phillips and Ellen Lau.

We also thank the National Science Foundation Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences for a new grant that will support our work over the next three years.  This grant, entitled “Effects of lexical predictability on foveal and parafoveal processing in reading” (Adrian Staub, PI; Lisa Sanders Co-PI), funds a series of eyetracking experiments using the boundary paradigm that we hope will help us better understand how predictability influences lexical processing.  Some of these experiments involve co-registration of eye movements and EEG.

Lap-Ching Keung was just awarded the Jerrold J. Katz Young Scholar Award at the 2017 CUNY Conference at MIT.  The award “recognizes the paper or poster presented at the Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing that best exhibits the qualities of intellectual rigor, creativity, and independence of thought exemplified in Professor Katz’s life and work.”

Lap received the award for his paper, co-authored with Adrian Staub, “Closest conjunct agreement in English: A comparison with number attraction,” presented at the 2016 CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing at the University of Florida.  The paper presents evidence from both production studies and eyetracking during reading that agreement with a conjoined subject (e.g., The dog and the cat…) is not reliably plural when the second conjunct is singular.

Congratulations Lap!!