Course Description
Studying sentence production is difficult, especially when we want to understand how speakers produce sentences involving linguistically informative but rare phenomena such as filler-gap dependencies across clauses. Often, it is challenging to elicit sentences involving infrequent structures in the lab. However, to build theories of sentence production that can be integrated with theories of grammatical knowledge, it is critical to study how speakers produce sentences that involve complex and rare structures. Despite the challenge, sentence production researchers have made exciting methodological and theoretical progress in recent years. In this course, we will introduce methods and theories in sentence production research, focusing on syntactic and semantic aspects of production. Students will gain hands-on experience designing sentence production experiments while discussing recent experimental studies, their implications on theories of sentence production, and the relationship between sentence production theories and theories of grammatical knowledge.
Area Tags: Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Science, Language Production
(Session 1) Monday/Thursday 1:30pm – 2:50pm
Location: ILC S331
Instructor: Shota Momma
Shota Momma is an assistant professor in linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Momma studies how speakers assemble sentence structures using their knowledge of grammar and his research aims to integrate theories of sentence production and theories of grammatical knowledge. Before coming to UMass, Momma worked as a post-doctoral researcher in Victor Ferreira’s language production lab at the University of California, San Diego. Before that, he worked as a graduate student in the department of linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he was advised by Colin Phillips.
