language processing lab

Amber Turner

Amber did an independent research project during the spring and fall semesters of 2006 investigating the effects of lexical match on pronoun use. She will graduate in May 2007 and plans to pursue a graduate degree in clinical psychology.

Our lab investigates the cognitive mechanisms underlying language comprehension and production, in both adults and children. Of particular interest is how we understand and produce language "on-line", as it occurs in real time. Much of our work focuses on referring expressions like "the tall fast girl", "the girl", or "she". How do listeners identify referents in the moments after they hear a referring expression? In particular, how do they integrate information from multiple sources that constrains the likelihood that the speaker is referring to a particular object? How do speakers make choices between more- and less- explicit forms of reference? This work bears on questions of how people rapidly integrate information from multiple sources, both linguistic and nonlinguistic, how they build representations of the situation that focus on some things more than others, as well as questions about the degree to which speaking and understanding involve maintaining representations of the knowledge, goals, and intentions of one's interlocutors.

The main tool we use for investigating comprehension processes is the monitoring of eye movements. We use the Eyelink II head-mounted eyetracker, produced by SR Research. With children, we use either an ISCAN head-mounted eye-tracker, or a video-based system. For more information on our research with children, see the UNC language development laboratory page.

Jennifer E. Arnold ~ UNC Chapel Hill ~ Dept. of Psychology