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Research > Language and Cognition
The Language and Cognition group works within the general approach of cognitive science, which brings the ideas and methods of cognitive psychology, linguistics, philosophy, and computer science to bear on the scientific investigation of mental processes and representations. Group members examine language processing at different levels of organization, ranging from speech perception to sentence-level processing, and they examine issues in conceptual structure and cognitive and development. Group members interact at weekly meetings that include talks by outside guest speakers, presentation of ongoing research projects of faculty and students within the group, and discussion of recent papers in the broad area of cognitive science. Specific topics being investigated include the nature and role of acoustic-phonetic variability in speech production and perception; interactions between working memory and various levels of structural, conceptual, and discourse knowledge during the processing of spoken and written language; the role of hearing in speech production and perception; the ways in which the structure and use of American Sign Language can inform us about universal properties of language; the effects of culture and experience on categorization, reasoning, and conceptual development; and the influence of causal knowledge on categorization, memory, and decision making.
State-of-the-art facilities are available for the experimental investigation of a wide range of topics in language and cognition. The group's laboratories provide computer-based equipment and facilities for preparing and editing visual and auditory materials, including the editing, analysis and synthesis of speech; eye-tracking and other equipment for running online studies of language and cognitive processing; and facilities for conducting studies of categorization and reasoning. In addition to laboratory studies, opportunities exist for field research in conceptual structure and reasoning with both children and adults, and in clinical thinking with health care professionals and patients. Active research associations with other regional and national universities provide additional technical resources and collaborative opportunities.
Specialization: Categorization, Reasoning and Development Laboratory: Categorization and Reasoning Laboratory
Specialization: Causal Reasoning, Concepts and Clinical Thinking Laboratory: Causal Cognition Laboratory Dr. Kim's research asks how causal and explanatory knowledge is mentally represented and organized, and how this representation affects basic cognitive processes such as categorization and memory. Previous research suggests that concepts are represented as abstract theories (e.g., theories about schizophrenia in general), yet other evidence shows that concepts contain information tied to specific exemplars or instances (e.g., a patient with schizophrenia whom you saw yesterday). One line of her research program asks how these two types of information fit together in a coherent model of knowledge representation. A second line seeks to uncover how causal knowledge representation affects categorization processes, including the categorization of everyday objects, diagnoses of mental illness, and the categorization of others into stereotype groups. This line of research seeks to map out specific and reliable mechanisms whereby a person's causal theories of a concept influence categorization decisions. Kim and her lab group examine these processes with both artificial concepts developed for highly controlled studies and with real-world concepts (e.g., as used in clinical settings when diagnosing and reasoning about patients and illness). Specialization: Language and the Deaf
Specialization: Speech Perception, Lexical Access Laboratory: Speech Perception Laboratory
Specialization: Sentence Processing Laboratory: Sentence Processing Laboratory
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Facilities
Dr.
Coley seeks to answer questions about the basic cognitive processes of
categorization, reasoning, and conceptual development. Three themes run
through his research. The first, Domain Specificity, is the idea that
cognitive processes may differ substantially as a function of what kinds
of objects are being thought about. To date his work has focused on the
domain of folkbiology, which encompasses how humans conceptualize the
natural world of plants and animals, but current work is beginning to
systematically examine thinking in other domains. A second theme is Comparative
Research. By examining little-studied populations who differ markedly
in terms of culture and relevant experience, he hopes to expand the data
base from which theoretical accounts of categorization and reasoning are
drawn, and to work toward identifying universal and variable aspects of
these basic cognitive processes. The third theme stresses the importance
of a Developmental Perspective. Human cognition is best seen as a dynamic
process that is constantly evolving and unfolding over time, rather than
a static set of rules or structures. No understanding of cognition is
complete without an account of how conceptual processes change over time.
Dr.
Lane studies the American Sign Language of the deaf and the ways in which
its structure, history and use shed light on universal properties of language,
and on social and educational issues concerning deaf people. He is also
conducting research on the role of hearing in speech: he analyzes how
and why speech deteriorates in adults who become deaf; and how it changes
when some hearing is restored with a cochlear implant.
Dr.
Miller’s research, which lies at the interface of cognitive psychology,
linguistics and speech and hearing science, focuses on how human listeners
recognize spoken words. Previous research in the field has shown that
the acoustic form of any given word is not constant from utterance to
utterance, but changes as a function of such factors as the specific talker
who is speaking, the rate of speech and the context in which the word
is produced. Despite such variability, human listeners recognize spoken
words with remarkable ease. Miller and her research team use a variety
of experimental paradigms to investigate the perceptual processes that
underlie this ability. The results of such investigations constrain theories
of normal speech and language processing as well as theories of speech
and language disorders, and they have implications for the development
of human speech technologies.
Dr.
Pearlmutter is interested in sentence comprehension and sentence generation
processes, including ambiguity resolution, the use of grammatical constraints
and the interaction and timing of use of constraints derived from working
memory, real-world knowledge, grammatical knowledge and frequency information.
The goal is to understand both how the meanings of individual words are
combined by comprehenders to create the meanings of whole sentences (sentence
comprehension), and how sentences are created given a meaning that a speaker
has in mind to convey (sentence generation). In investigating these questions,
Pearlmutter uses various methodologies including word-by-word reading,
eyetracking, functional neuroimaging (event-related potential recording
and event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging), computational
modeling and examination of large text corpora. Some of his current research
examines whether comprehenders can consider multiple possible interpretations
of a sentence simultaneously, how individual differences in working memory
impact sentence understanding, the relationship between the different
meanings for a word and its different grammatical possibilities, the neurological
bases for the computation of sentence meaning and the degree to which
the intended meaning of different phrases determines the nature of sentence
planning processes.