Research Interests |
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| I'm interested in processes underlying human language production. I started off looking mostly at the part
of the so called Grammatical Encoding. This describes the mechanism that comes into play when speakers
bring a conceptual proposition or a "message" into an utterable structure. As my background is
Clinical Linguistics, I began with looking at impaired speech. In my Magister Thesis I looked at the production of complex syntactic constructions (i.e. center embedded relative clauses) in aphasic speakers. Now I'm more interested in healthy speakers. Many of the paradigms used in Psycholinguistics mainly offer the possibility to use offline measures to look at what's happening on the way from concepts to sentences. My research now involves the analysis of eye-movement data, which gives opportunity to use an online measure for these purposes. The idea is to find out more about processes involved in producing utterances. The (eye-tracking) experiments I run involve either one speaker and two speakers, so I look at production in both monologue and dialogue. In the dialogue studies, I manipulate the degree to which subjects can give feedback. In the monologue studies, the technique I use in addition to Eye-Tracking is mainly priming. Priming describes the tendency of recently processed stimuli to influence the processing of following stimuli. Priming is also seen to be one process that underlies the (automatic) entrainment among interlocutors in conversation. This is also one of the reasons why I'm interested in dialogues - and of course in eye-movement data in dialogues. |