Language processing

Eye tracker

Steven Frisson

Steven Frisson's main interest is in semantic processing during reading – how do we understand the (literal/figurative/extended) meaning of a word in a sentence, and why is it that most of us are so good at it? Other research deals with different levels of language processing, including the influence of morphology, phonology, and predictability on word recognition in sentences, and the time course that higher-order reasoning and inferencing can have on sentence interpretation. Recent work also involves language processing in different subgroups: e.g., people who stutter (with my Ph.D. candidate, Chloe Corcoran), children with ASD, and neglect patients. His preferred technique to investigate these and related issues is eye-tracking.

Andrea Krott

Andrea Krott is interested in children's language acquisition as well as adult language processing. In terms of language acquisition, she has been particularly interested in how children learn to interpret relational components of compound words (e.g. is a banana lorry a lorry FOR bananas or a lorry MADE OF bananas?). Recently she has been involved in a collaboration investigating bilingual language assessment. With regards to adult language processing, she is particularly interested in the neuronal processes that support both speaking and reading.

Andrew Olson

Andrew Olson is interested in how language is organised in the mind and how it is affected by various disorders: brain damage, deafness, dyslexia and degenerative brain disease. His laboratory uses a variety of techniques—psycholinguistic experiments, neuropsychological assessment, eye-tracking and computational modelling—to understand how we speak, read, write and understand. We test theories of language organisation using formal statistical models and model selection.

Katrien Segaert

My research focuses on sentence level language processing, mostly syntactic and semantic processing. I am interested in how these core language processes work, how the workings change throughout the lifespan, and how they are instantiated in the brain. I use a variety of techniques including behavioural psycholinguistic experiments, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG).

Representative articles

Schoot, L., Menenti, L., Hagoort, P., & Segaert, K. (2014). A little more conversation - The influence of communicative context on syntactic priming in brain and behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 5: 208. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00208. (PDF)

Segaert, K., Weber, K., Cladder-Micus, M., & Hagoort, P. (2014). The influence of verb-bound syntactic preferences on the processing of syntactic structures.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(5), 1448-1460. doi:10.1037/a0036796. (PDF)

Segaert, K., Weber, K., De Lange, F., Petersson, K. M., & Hagoort, P. (2013).The suppression of repetition enhancement: A review of fMRI studies. Neuropsychologia, 51, 59-66. doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2012.11.006. (PDF)

Segaert, K., Menenti, L., Weber, K., Petersson, K. M., & Hagoort, P. (2012).Shared syntax in language production and language comprehension — An fMRI study. Cerebral Cortex, 22, 1662-1670. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhr249. (PDF)

Linda Wheeldon

Linda Wheeldon’s research focuses language production processes. She investigates the generation of intonation, syntax and lexical access for spoken sentence production and the scope of planning for these processes. She is also interested in the development of prosody in children and the effects of prosodic grouping on speech production and verbal short term memory. Other research examines the representation and retrieval of lexical phonology and morphology.

Representative articles

Wheeldon, L. R. & Lahiri, A. (1997). Prosodic units in language production. Journal of Memory and Language, 37, 356-381. (PDF)

Wheeldon, L. R. (2000) Aspects of language production. Psychology Press.

Smith, M.C., & Wheeldon, L.R. (2001). Syntactic priming in spoken sentence production: An online study. Cognition, 78, 123-164. (PDF)

Smith, M. C. & Wheeldon L. R. (2004). Horizontal Information Flow in Spoken Sentence Production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition, 30, 675–686. (PDF)

Allum, P. & Wheeldon, L. R. (2007). Planning Scope in Spoken Sentence Production: The Role of Grammatical Units. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition. Vol 33 (4), 791-810. (PDF)

Allum, P. & Wheeldon, L. R. (2009). Scope of lexical access in spoken sentence production: Implications for the conceptual-syntactic interface. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning Memory and Cognition. Vol 35 (5), 1240-1255. (PDF)

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