People > Graduate Students

Maureen Gillespie
Graduate Student
Department of Psychology, 125-NI
Northeastern University
Boston, MA 02115 USA
(617) 373-3077 (office)
(617) 373-8714 (fax)
gillespie.m@neu.edu

• See curriculum vitae (pdf)

Advisor: Neal Pearlmutter

Research

I am a graduate student in Professor Neal Pearlmutter's laboratory. Generally, my research interests are focused on the interplay of syntax and semantics in language production (how we plan what we say) and comprehension (how we understand what we hear and read). My current research examines the way humans produce language and keep track of grammatical information across an entire sentence. Specifically, I examine the syntactic and semantic properties of noun phrases that elicit subject-verb agreement errors in sentences as a means to understand the underlying mechanisms of syntactic planning. Future research using this paradigm will examine the ways in which the syntactic planning strategies of patients with Broca's aphasia (those who have lost the ability to produce fluent language due to brain injury) may differ from unimpaired individuals.