Congratulations are in order for Caroline Andrews, who was just awarded a Graduate School Dissertation Research Grant! Caroline’s dissertation project examines how we represent and access syntactic representations in short-term and long-term memory. The research grant will help support the experimental component of her thesis. Congratulations, Caroline!
Author Archives: Brian Dillon
Andrews and Dillon teach data analysis workshop
Caroline Andrews and Brian Dillon will teach an ISSR methods workshop entitled “Analyzing Categorical Data” on June 7th and June 8th. They will focus on advanced methods for analyzing categorical data, with a special focus on ordinal regression. In addition, they will cover intermediate topics in R such as organizing analysis workflow with the ‘tidyverse’ package, and project management using the Open Science Framework. For more information, see:
Registration is now open!
Ming Xiang visits!
We are lucky to have Ming Xiang (University of Chicago) visiting for the next two weeks as our very first psycholinguist in residence. Ming is a psychosemanticist with a diverse range interests at the intersection of psycholinguistics and semantics including gradable adjectives, resumptive pronouns, negation, wh-in-situ, and ellipsis. Ming is available for meeting with faculty and students, and can be reached at mxiang@uchicago.edu or by stopping by the visitor office by the N400. Say hi if you see her!
Alex Goebel awarded XPrag internship for Summer 2018
Our own Alex Goebel has been awarded an XPrag Internship for Summer 2018. He’ll be spending the summer in Cologne working with Professor Petra Schumacher, as part of her project “InfoPer: Processing speaker’s meaning: Informativeness and perspective.” During that time, Alex will work with Professor Schumacher on an investigation of the relation between German demonstrative pronouns and perspective. One particular focus of this work will be on the influence of expressive speech acts, and the question of how a comprehender is able to identify a speech act as expressive in the absence of unambiguous cues. Congratulations, Alex!
Shayne Sloggett successfully defends thesis!
On July 25th, Shayne Sloggett successfully defended his thesis, ‘When errors aren’t: How comprehenders selectively violate Binding Theory.’ Next up for Shayne is Northwestern University, where he will be taking a post-doctoral position in the Department of Linguistics. Congratulations to the new doctor, and best of luck!
Experimental Labs RAs to Grad School!
Grad-school-hunting season is over, and we are very proud to announce that four denizens of the experimental labs will be continuing their psycholinguistic research in excellent programs all around the globe! They are
Matthew Frelinger, who will be joining the Ph.D. program of UMass Psychological and Brain Sciences,
Kirk Goddard, who will be joining the MA program at the Basque Center for Brain and Language,
Grusha Prasad, who will be joining the Ph.D. program in Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University, and
Anthony Yacovone, who will be joining the Ph.D. program in Psychology at Harvard University.
Congratulations, all! We wish you the best of luck in your studies! Come back and visit often 🙂
Shelby Cox gets honorable mention for Goldwater Scholarship
Shelby Cox (Linguistics + Mathematics, ’18) has been awarded an honorable mention for the highly competitive national Barry Goldwater Scholarship. The Barry Goldwater Scholarship is the most prestigious scholarship for undergraduates working in the STEM fields. Congratulations, Shelby!
Nicoletta Biondo receives Marica di Vincenzi Scholarship
I’m very happy to share the news that former UMass visitor Nicoletta Biondo (Università di Trento) has been awarded a Marica de Vincenzi fellowship. The Marica de Vincenzi fellowship supports young Italian psycholinguists who seek to pursue studies abroad, and is run in Marica’s memory by the Marica de Vincenzi Foundation. With this support, Nicoletta will be continuing her studies at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language in Donostia – San Sebastián. She will be working with Simona Mancini, conducting a longitudinal ERP study to investigate the processing of agreement and tense in L2 learners of Spanish at different stages of proficiency. Congratulations, Nicoletta!
UMass Psycholinguists on tour, summer 2016!
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!