Research in Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics
Many faculty members of the University at Buffalo Linguistics department use a variety of empirical, quantitative, and experimental methods to investigate the representation and processing of human languages. Here is a list of areas in which research is being conducted by both faculty members and graduate students:
- Computational Psycholinguistics
- Corpus Linguistics
- Experimental Semantic Typology
- Human Sentence Processing
- Phonetics
- Sentence Production
Prof. Koenig's research focuses on the use of lexical information (particularly semantic information) in on-line sentence processing. In collaboration with Gail Mauner, he has explored the various ways in which argument structure is used to integrate constituents that co-occur with verbs, trying to distinguish the role of semantic argumenthood, world knowledge about situations, co-occurrence frequency, and morphosyntactic “activeness”.
Prof Roland's research focuses on statistical models of human and machine language processing, especially computational psycholinguistics (computational, probabilistic models of human language processing and learning). In particular he investigates how the differences between the isolated contexts typically studied in psycholinguistics and the information rich contexts found in normal language use affect the outcome of psycholinguistic experiments (in particular, the effects of semantic, discourse, and prosodic factors that typically operate over larger domains than the single sentence). In addition, he studies corpus linguistics with a focus on the sources of differences between corpora and how these differences affect statistical language models.
As a phonetician, Prof. Huang is interested in questions concerning cross-linguistic speech perception patterns. Are there universal patterns? Which aspects of speech perception are language-specific? One project she has worked on was lexical tone perception, looking at how tone perception could be influenced by the tonology of a listener's native language. Her findings suggest that language-specific perceptual patterns may have neuro-physiological basis.
Prof. Bohnemeyer pursues experimental research on the relationship between language and thought as an application of his work on semantic typology. Linguistic categorization varies across languages – if only within the bounds of constraints imposed by cognition. Semantic typology seeks to isolate universals of the language-cognition interface and determine what properties of linguistic representations are specific to particular languages and cultures. To the extent that conceptual categories are learned, linguistic categories may serve as powerful “bootstraps” for the enculturating individual learning to tune into culture-specific conceptualizations.The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (LRH) – that linguistic representations may constrain and shape non-linguistic cognitive representations – has long been debated in the cognitive sciences. Bohnemeyer has conducted tests of the LRH in the domains of temporal and spatial semantics within what is sometimes called the Neo-Whorfian program: identify two or more populations whose native languages differ in the constraints they impose on linguistic representations of particular states of affairs; perform experiments to assess internal cognitive representations of the states of affairs in these populations; if linguistic performance proves to be a predictor of cognitive performance, then look for additional evidence to make the case that the correlation in fact reflects causation from the properties of external representations to those of internal representations.
Prof. Jaeger's research focuses on slips of the tongue made by very young children both in English and many other language. For more details, see her recent book Kids' Slips (L. Earlbaum Assoc.), in which she documents that the early pattern of slips of the tongue is an important window to the acquisition of linguistic representations and processes.