The 31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference took place over spring break from March 15-17 in UC Davis, organized by UMass (psychology) alum Fernanda Ferreira. As every year, there was a large (!) contingent of current and previous UMass affiliates represented. (I apologize for everyone I missed on the list below due to very limited memory about past affiliates.)

Current Students & Faculty

• Carolyn Anderson:
  – Tomorrow is not always a day away (poster)
• Sakshi Bhatia:
  – Forgetting effects due to Local Coherence in Hindi (poster with Samar Husain)
  
• Jack Duff (BA):
  – Says who?: The influence of speech and mental predicates on epithet interpretation (poster)
  – Evidence for multiple memory representations from discourse anaphora and ellipsis (poster with Lyn Frazier)
  
• Alex Göbel:
  – Pronouns at the right frontier: discourse structure affects accessibility of final appositives (poster)
• Christopher Hammerly:
  – Resumptive pronouns can ameliorate island violations in real-time comprehension (poster)
  – Response bias modulates the grammaticality asymmetry: Evidence for a continuous valuation model of agreement attraction (poster with Adrian Staub & Brian Dillon)
  – The temporal dynamics of structure and content in the language network (third author on a talk by William Matchin, Christian Brodbeck & Ellen Lau)
• Rodica Ivan:
  – When NPI illusions fail: the case of strict NPIs and neg-words in Romanian (poster with Brian Dillon)
• Adrian Staub (psych):
  – Predictability effects in reading require valid parafoveal preview (talk with Kirk Goddard)
• Michael Wilson:
  – Interpreting an interpretive illusion: What the Dative Illusion tells us about processing (poster)

Alums

• Katy Carlson (PhD ’01):
  – Focus particles strongly draw attachment (poster)
• Michael Walsh Dickey (PhD ’00):
  – Event-referent activation in the visual world: Persistent activation is guided by both lexical and event representations (second author on a poster by Haley Dresang & Tessa Warren [post-doc ’01-’03])
  – To adapt or not to adapt: No evidence that readers adjust their expectation for a disjunction in the either…or structure (third author on a poster by Michelle Colvin & Tessa Warren)
• Fernanda Ferreira:
  – Encoding semantically rich words: The relative effects of reactivation and distinctiveness (second author on a poster by Hossein Karimi)
  – Effects of linguistic focus and lexical frequency on reading times (second author on a poster by Matthew Lowder)
  – The flexibility of multiword sequences: Evidence from eye tracking (second author on a poster by Suphasiree Chanta)
• Jesse Harris (PhD ’12):
  – Correlative adverbs mark not only scope but also contrast: Corpus and eye tracking data (talk)
  – Complement coercion induces greater garden path cost: Two eye tracking studies (poster)
  – Cue reliability affects anticipatory use of prosody in processing globally ambiguous sentences (second author on a talk by Chie Nakamura & Sun-Ah Jun)
  – Predictive processing and reliability in the influence of prosody in L2 structural analysis (second author on a poster by Chie Nakamura, Sun-Ah Jun & Yuki Hirose)
• Andrea Martin (BA from Hampshire College ’04):
  – Rhythmic computation of linguistic structure (invited talk)
  – Readers utilise proper noun capitalisation to determine syntactic class prior to direct fixation (second author on a poster by Michael G. Cutter & Patrick Sturt)
• Grusha Prasad (BA from Hampshire College ’17):
  – The P600 for singular ‘they’: How the brain reacts when John decides to treat themselves to sushi (poster with Joanna Morris & Mark Feinstein)
• Stephanie Rich (BA ’16):
  – Disconfirmed lexical predictions linger in highly constraining contexts (poster with Jesse Harris)
  – Local constraint is inhibited by global context in concessive structures (poster with Jesse Harris)
• Jeff Runner (PhD ’95):
  – Gender Effects on Gender Ambiguous Anaphor Resolution (third author on a poster by Yuhang Xu, Yedan Tian & Mike Tanenhaus)
• Shayne Sloggett (PhD ’17):
  – Person blocking in reflexive processing: when “I” matter more than “them” (talk with Brian Dillon)
• Anthony Yacovone (BA ’16):
  – Developmental shifts from bottom-up lexical biases to top-down plausibility in syntactic parsing (poster with Carissa Shafto, Amanda Worek & Jesse Snedeker)

Post-Docs & Visitors

• Nicoletta Biondo (department visitor ’15-‘):
  – Distance matters during adverb-verb tense processing: evidence from ERPs (poster with Emma Bergamini & Francesco Vespignani)
  – Verb class is early used during the processing of subject-verb agreement (in Italian) (third author on a poster by Francesco Vespignani & Emma Bergamini)
• Mara Breen (post-doc ’07-’11):
  – Prosody, Poetry and Processing: ERP Evidence for Hierarchical Metric Structure in Silent Reading (second author with Ahren B. Fitzroy on a talk by Michelle Oraa Ali)
• Tessa Warren:
  – Idioms show effects of meaning relatedness and dominance similar to those seen for ambiguous words (second author on a poster by Evelyn Milburn)
• Ming Xiang (current visitor):
  – Production and comprehension of referential expressions show divergent behavior (talk with Allison Kramer, Timothy Leffel & Chris Kennedy)
  – Memory retrieval in comprehension is sensitive to production alternatives (poster with Josef Klafka)
  – The role of contextual-pragmatic information in speech perception: an eye-tracking study (second author on a poster by Yenan Sun, Eszter Ronai & Alan Yu)
  – Processing imprecision: the interpretation of round numerals in context (second author on a poster by Helena Aparicio & Christopher Kennedy)