Brown | CLPS | Laura Kertz | Lab

• Home
• Lab
• Research
• Teaching
• Students

• we are located in Metcalf Research Lab
  190-194 Thayer St.
  Room 207
  voice: (401)863-7681
  fax: (401)863-2255
  

lab news

Lab Members Laura Kertz and Corey Cusimano presented a poster on coherence and parallelism effects in conjoined clauses at CUNY 2013.

Laura Kertz and Brendan Hainline presented their research on ungrammatical ellipses at the Linguistics Society of America meeting this year.

Jenna Zeigen and Brendan Hainline graduated from Brown! Brendan is now at the University of Chicago studying Linguistics. Jenna is living in New York working in computer science.

Sentence and Discourse Processing Lab

Our lab investigates the processes and representations involved in the production and comprehension of human language. We conduct research on a variety of topics, usually addressing one or more of the following questions:

• How do speakers package information into meaningful "chunks" both above and below the sentence level?
• How do hearers integrate multiple sentence-size chunks into larger discourse structure?
• What are the underlying mechanisms that support the interpretation of underspecified chunks like pronouns and elliptical utterances?

Our approach to these questions is informed by theoretical models of information structure, pragmatics, and the syntax/semantic interface. In testing our hypotheses we use a range of methodologies including off-line instruments (questionnaires, magnitude estimation, sentence-completion tasks) and online measures (self-paced reading time, eye-tracking while reading, visual world eye-tracking). The lab also has access to shared facilities for recording and analyzing speech production and for EEG/ERP data collection.

Current Projects

Projects in the lab currently address three lines of research:

• time course of processing for verbal anaphora
• the role of discourse in facilitation for parallel structure
• lexical access effects in anaphor resolution

Student projects pursue a variety of topics related to sentence and discourse-level processing, including lexical access in the interpretation of puns (Jenna Zeigen, senior thesis) and sentence-level constraints on speech perception (Neal Fox, first year graduate project).

how to find us

We are located in the newly renovated Metcalf Research Lab at the corner of Thayer Street and Waterman, room 207. map

get involved

If you are interested in participating in an experiment, or if you are an undergraduate or graduate student at Brown looking to get involved in language processing research, contact us at kertzlab@brown.edu for more information.

Valid XHTML | Valid CSS | Design by SmallPark