Psycholinguistics Laboratory

 

Address: Room 101, #42 E. Delaware Ave.

Phone: 302-831-8203

Lab Director: Colin Phillips (302-831-6809)

The lab has facilities for experimentation and analysis in sentence processing and language acquisition using Macintosh or PC computers, and facilities for analysis of MEG recordings of brain activity, which is gathered at centers at UC San Francisco, MIT and NYU. We have recently begun to pursue our neurolinguistic work direct at UD, using 128-channel ERP recordings of brain activity, thanks to a grant from the National Science Foundation to a group of labs in the UD Cognitive Science Program. Facilities are also available for computational modeling, and through the cognitive science program, lab members have access to a phonetics laboratory for speech recordings and experimentation and a head-mounted eye-tracking lab (directed by Jim Hoffman, Psychology).

Our work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience, Oak Ridge Associated Universities, and the University of Delaware Research Foundation.

At our weekly lab meetings we present work-in-progress and discuss new and recent research of interest. All are welcome to attend.

People in the Lab

Colin Phillips - Assistant Professor, colin@udel.edu

Ted Eastwick - PhD student, language processing, tbear@udel.edu

Evniki Edgar - PhD student, language processing, evniki@udel.edu

Baris Kabak - PhD student, language processing, syntax, neurolinguistics kabak@udel.edu

Nina Kazanina - PhD student, language acquisition, linguistic typology, neurolinguistics, ninaka@udel.edu

Chonghyuck Kim - PhD student, syntactic theory, language acquisition, cheesue@udel.edu

Jason Lilley - PhD student, syntactic theory, computational linguistics, jlilley@udel.edu

Kaia Wong - PhD student, language processing, neurolinguistics, kaia@udel.edu

Tom Pellathy - BA/MA student, neurolinguistics, pellathy@udel.edu

Graduates

Meesook Kim - PhD 1999, A Cross-linguistic Perspective on the Acquisition of Locative Verbs. 250pp. 693k (pdf format). Currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the U. of Pennsylvania. meesook@linc.cis.upenn.edu
David Schneider - PhD 1999, Parsing and Incrementality. 258pp. 576k (pdf format). Currently working on artificial intelligence research for Cycorp in Austin, TX. dschneid@cis.udel.edu

Some Recent Presentations

• Ted Eastwick & Colin Phillips. "Variability in semantic cue effectiveness: inducing low-span performance in high-span readers." Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing IV. University of Edinburgh, Scotland. September 1999. Handout: Acrobat PDF (52k), postscript (310k)
• Colin Phillips, Tom Pellathy & Alec Marantz. "Magnetic mismatch field elicited by phonological feature contrast." Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Washington DC, April 1999. Acrobat PDF (715k)
• David Schneider & Colin Phillips. "Reanalysis as a last resort?" CUNY Conference on Sentence Processing. New York City, March 1999.
• Meesook Kim, Barbara Landau & Colin Phillips. "Cross-linguistic differences in children's syntax for locative verbs." Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston, November 1998. Acrobat PDF (64k), postscript (160k), Word98 (96k, stuffed).

For other papers from the lab, go to Colin Phillips' downloadable papers page.

Current Research Projects

• Experimental Studies of Sentence Comprehension
  • The nature of the search-space in parsing: reanalysis as a first or last resort (Dave Schneider)
  • Resource limitations and information integration (Ted Eastwick)
  • Semantic vs. syntactic lexical information, and the limits of lexicalization (Evniki Edgar, Baris Kabak)
  • Islands and parasitic gaps - how does the parser handle dependencies which rely on later syntactic information for licensing? (Kaia Wong)
  • Locality in sentence comprehension (with Ted Gibson (MIT))
• ERP Studies of Sentence Comprehension
  • Distinguishing storage-based and computation-based models of syntactic complexity using event-related brain potentials (Kaia Wong, Tom Pellathy, Nina Kazanina, with Danny Dilks, Psychology)
• MEG Studies of Speech Perception
  • Phonological categories and features in auditory mismatch fields (Tom Pellathy, Baris Kabak; with Alec Marantz (MIT) and others)
  • Extraction of feature-specific information in vowel perception (with David Poeppel (U.Md), Krishna Govindarajan, Alec Marantz (MIT) and others)
• Computational Modeling of Syntax and Sentence Processing
  • A fully-incremental parser for head-initial and head-final languages (Dave Schneider)
  • Neural network modeling of generalization from simple input to more complex structures in sentence processing (Ted Eastwick)
• Syntactic Theory
  • Incremental structure building and syntactic constituency
  • The syntax of comparative constructions and the typology of deletion processes (Jason Lilley)
  • A parametric study of the relationship between locative verb syntax, serial verb constructions, and null object constructions (with Meesook Kim, U. of Pennsylvania)
• Language Acquisition
  • Cross-linguistic differences in syntax-semantics correspondences for locative verbs (with Meesook Kim, U. of Pennsylvania and Barbara Landau, Psychology)
  • Distinguishing universal and language-specific constraints on coreference in the development of Russian (Nina Kazanina)
  • Morphological productivity and the development of negation in Korean (Chonghyuck Kim, with Eunkyung Sung and Sunah Son)

Lab meetings schedule

Spring 1998
Fall 1998

Spring 2000