PostDoctoral Research Fellowship

Watson Duane G, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

This Social and Behavioral Sciences Post-Doctoral Fellowship research program focuses on the relationship between information structure and prosodic structure in language. This work has two objectives. The first is to understand how the information status of words (e.g. their newness, oldness, or focus status) influences intonational phrasing in language production. The second goal is to understand how listeners interpret intonational phrase boundaries and pitch accents in on-line language comprehension. This research program also has two primarily methodological goals. The first goal is to test a new paradigm for eliciting spontaneous speech from participants in the lab. The second goal is to use an eye-tracking paradigm to explore the interpretation of prosodic information in language comprehension. The researcher will pursue a set of experiments will explore the relationship between information structure and prosodic structure. The experiments are as follows: Production Experiments: the first set of experiments explores the effects of discourse status on intonational boundary placement in reading. The second set of experiments explores the affects of discourse status on intonational boundary placement in spontaneous speech. Comprehension Experiments: the third set of experiments investigates the points at which intonational boundary information is used in the interpretation of an utterance. The fourth set of experiments use the eye-tracking paradigm to determine the point at which pitch accents are interpreted. Differences in the semantic interpretation of pitch accents are also investigated. The PI, Dr. Duane Watson, will be under the mentorship of Dr. Michael K. Tanenhaus at the University of Rochester Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.