Sam Handel Undergraduate

Leighanne McGill Undergraduate

Dr. Bruno Estigarribia Research professor of psychology, UNC Chapel Hill

Dr. Misha Becker Professor of linguistics, UNC Chapel Hill

Dr. Peter Gordon Professor of psychology, UNC Chapel Hill

Dr. Rebecca Nappa

Becky was a postdoctoral visiting scholar in 2007-2009. She is now a postdoctoral fellow in Jesse Snedecker's lab at Harvard University

Jordan Todd

Jordan did an independent research project during the spring and fall semesters of 2006 investigating the effects of lying on language production. He also worked as a research assistant in the spring of 2007. He is currently in graduate school studying Organizational Psychology at Appalachian State University, and continues to do ad-hoc work on some projects in the lab.

Nate Crosby

Nate worked on an independent research project from fall 2008 to spirng 2009. He is planning to study business administration in graduate school.

Jennifer Tate

Jennifer worked on an independent research project from fall 2008 to spirng 2009

Dr.Yi Ting Huang Post-doctorate

Natalia Bermudez Undergraduate

Alyssa Ventimiglia Undergaduate

Jason Kahn Graduate Student

Kellen Carpenter Lab Manager

Selena Beckman-Harned

Selena did an independent research project in the spring of 2005. She graduated in May 2006 and is currently pursuing a Master's degree in professional writing at Carnegie Mellon University.

Lorelle Babwah

Lorelle worked as a research assistant and did an honors project from spring 2007 to spring 2008.

Tatiana Meteleva

Tatiana did an independent research project in the spring of 2005.

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 graduated in May 2007 and plans to pursue a graduate degree in clinical psychology.

Glenn Kern

Glenn worked as a research assistant in fall 2004, fall 2006, and spring 2007. He graduated in May 2007 and is currently working on an organic farm in the mountains of North Carolina.

Cathleen Sparks

Cathleen worked as a research assistant from spring 2007 to the spring of 2008.

Shin-Yi Lao

Shin-Yi worked as lab manager from fall 2005 to spring 2008. She is now a professional nurse.

Alex Christodoulou Graduate Student

Dr. Jennifer E. Arnold P.I.

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.

The UNC Language Processing Lab

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