Reseach Interests

My current research is concerned with the extent to which human language processing has adapted so as to make optimal use of available information. I am particularly interested in the use of probabilistic and connectionist techniques for modelling both the role of linguistic experience as well as adaptation to linguistic and non-linguistic context. Not only are such mechanisms ideal for characterising near optimal behavior, they also naturally account for the kinds of preferences that people accrue as a result of their linguistics experience.

I'm currently interested primarily in how language comprehension interacts with visual processing of out immediate surroundings. We know that spoken language can rapidly direct our attention to objects in our field of view, and furthermore, that the visual context can rapidly influence language comprehension and disambiguation. There is also evidence suggesting that our mental representations of objects are directly linked to their physical location in the world, so-called spatial indexing. To investigate these topics, my group conducts eye-tracking experiments, and is also engaged in the development of a connectionist model of (visually) situated comprehension.

More generally, my research interests include:

• Coordinated interplay of language comprehension and scene apprehension mechanisms, and the influence of the immediate visual context during comprehension.
• Connectionist models of language comprehension, scene-sentence integration and visual attention.
• The cognitive importance of utterance-mediated eye-movements.
• Modelling the relationship between distributational properties of language and human linguistic biases.
• Statistical models of lexical syntax-syntax, including subcategorization and argument structure, word sense, and thematic fit.
• Incremental probabilistic models of human sentence parsing and interpretation.
• Experimental studies of human linguistic comprehension and production, using eye-tracking to monitor gaze in both reading and visual world settings.

In past research with Patrick Sturt and Martin Pickering (Edinburgh), I have also worked on the problem of syntactic reanalysis. While theories of syntactic processing typically focus on the problem of initial disambiguation strategies, it is also necessary to understand the mechanisms used to recover from erroneous decisions, or 'reanalyse'. This research has developed a monotonic model of parsing and reanalysis, wherein certain revision operations can be carried out straightforwardly, while other are predicted to lead to conscious processing difficulty. In addtion to explaining a range of existing evidence, we have also conducted new experiments which confirm the model, and identify a clear distinction between 'easy' reanalysis and conscious 'garden path' constructions.