The summer was busy for UMass Psycholinguists. Here are some of the highlights of what UMass psycholinguistics folk got up to over the summer!

– At Mayfest, May 6-7 at the University of Maryland, Craige Roberts (former UMass student) and
Lyn Frazier gave invited talks. Craige Roberts talked about ‘Pragmatics in context,’ and Lyn Frazier talked about ‘Context effects on interpretation: The QUD.’

– At the Ellipsis Across Borders Conference 2016 (20-21 June in Sarajevo), Jesse Harris, Katy Carlson (former UMass students), David Erschler, and Lyn Frazier (an invited speaker) all represented UMass. Jesse and Katy gave a talk entitled “Remnant seeks correlate for contrastive relationship. Locals preferred.”; David gave a talk entitled “On high and low licensing of gapping”; and Lyn gave a talk entitled “Processing ellipsis: the Recycling approach revisited.”

– At Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP) in Bilbao, UMass was represented by Shayne Sloggett, Caroline Anderson, Anthony Yacavone, Amy Schafer, Brian Dillon, Chuck Clifton and Lyn Frazier, as well as by former post-doc Britta Stolterfoht, and visiting student Nicoletta Biondo. Numerous other presentations were given by frequent visitors Markus Bader, Barbara Hemforth and by former Hampshire student Andrea Martin. The list includes:

A matter of time (and features): comparing temporal concord and subject-verb agreement. Nicoletta Biondo, Francesco Vespignani, Luigi Rizzi & Simona Mancini

Likelihood of Epistemic State Affects Sentence Naturalness. Charles Clifton, Lyn Frazier & Anthony Yacovone

The role of individual empathic skills on the online processing of intonational meaning. Núria Esteve-Gibert, Cristel Portes, Amy Schafer, Barbara Hemforth & Mariapaola D’Imperio

A neural oscillatory signature of reference. Mante S. Nieuwland & Andrea E. Martin

When do comprehenders violate the Binding Theory? It depends on your point of view. Shayne Sloggett & Brian Dillon

Reflexives: We don’t see the attraction. Caroline Andrews, Anthony Yacovone, Shayne Sloggett & Brian Dillon

Processing information structure: Experimental evidence for a syntactic topic position in German. Britta Stolterfoht & Melanie Störze

– The DGfS summer school was held at Tuebingen, May 13-26 2016. It featured a course by former visiting student Petra Schulz on Acquisition of Semantics, and a course by Lyn Frazier on Processing at the Syntax-Discourse Interface. Alex Goebel attended the summer school, after already attending the summer school at Gottingen.

– Adrian Staub traveled to the UK, where he gave a talk at UCL Linguistics (“Extreme relative clause avoidance”), and then traveled to Bournemouth University to work with Bernhard Angele. While there, he gave a talk on “Seriality, structure, and the processing of relative clauses” and a workshop on “Using the ex-Gaussian distribution: Why, how, and what we’ve learned”.

– Brian Dillon gave a talk at Haskins Laboratories on 6/16. His talk was called “The search for an antecedent: Reflexive-antecedent dependencies and structurally constrained retrieval in comprehension”

– The 2nd annual psycholinguistics retreat was held in Chatham, NY. The psycholinguists found a waterfall at the High Falls Conservatio
n Area, sat at its base, and talked about psycholinguistics till the sun went down (and then on into the evening). Photo evidence provided at right!