Bridging Linguistic Fieldwork and Psycholinguistics to Investigate Reflexive Processing

Guevara, Jed Sam Pizarro, Northampton MA

Investigators

Abstract

This award was provided as part of NSF's Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences (SBE) Postdoctoral Research Fellowships (SPRF) program and SBE's Linguistics program. The goal of the SPRF program is to prepare promising, early career doctoral-level scientists for scientific careers in academia, industry or private sector, and government. SPRF awards involve two years of training under the sponsorship of established scientists and encourage Postdoctoral Fellows to perform independent research. NSF seeks to promote the participation of scientists from all segments of the scientific community, including those from underrepresented groups, in its research programs and activities; the postdoctoral period is considered to be an important level of professional development in attaining this goal. Each Postdoctoral Fellow must address important scientific questions that advance their respective disciplinary fields. Under the sponsorship of Dr. Brian Dillon at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, this postdoctoral fellowship award supports an early career scientist investigating how speakers understand pronouns in real-time. The goal of this project is to better understand the complex mental processes that make language comprehension seem effortless for many adults in their native language. This project will focus on how unique grammatical features, such as word order and complex voice system, shape the real-time comprehension of pronouns. More broadly, the goal of this project is to help us better understand the relative contributions of sentence structure (syntax) and sentence meaning (semantics) in real-time language comprehension. A better understanding of how humans use linguistic information to understand language can in turn help in the development of natural language processing systems to allow computers to better approximate human language use. The project investigates these questions by exploring how comprehenders process reflexives in real-time. Reflexive pronouns are pronouns that are subject to strict syntactic and semantic licensing requirements, and can be used to understand how rapidly these sources of information are used to constrain comprehension. To examine the relative contributions of structural information (e.g., c-command and syntactic locality) and semantic information (e.g., thematic roles), the researcher will deploy a series of experiments using the Visual World paradigm. The experiments in this project will measure the extent to which comprehenders attend to different referents over time to better understand how quickly and accurately comprehenders identify the antecedent of a reflexive. The project will yield the first comprehensive set of linguistic and psycholinguistic data on the comprehension of reflexives. The project's results will also help establish the methodological validity of using the visual world paradigm to study retrieval interference; and directly address the lack of linguistic diversity in the psycholinguistics literature. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.