NSF Award
1513806
The Directorate of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences offers postdoctoral research fellowships to provide opportunities for recent doctoral graduates to obtain additional training, to gain research experience under the sponsorship of established scientists, and to broaden their scientific horizons beyond their undergraduate and graduate training. Postdoctoral fellowships are further designed to assist new scientists to direct their research efforts across traditional disciplinary lines and to avail themselves of unique research resources, sites, and facilities, including at foreign locations. This postdoctoral fellowship award supports a rising scholar in the interdisciplinary field of psycholinguistics, focusing on the flexibility of language comprehension. Individuals' external environments and internal cognitive and emotional resources are in a constant state of flux, from day to day and even from moment to moment. This variability presents major challenges for effective communication. For example, interacting with people from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds exposes listeners to massive variability in accents, word choices, speech rates, and inflections. In addition, changes in individuals' internal processing resources have strong effects on how they approach and interpret sensory information. These include not only moment-to-moment shifts in cognitive goals and emotional states, but also listeners? perceptual abilities, which vary considerably from person to person and are also subject to change on both short and long time scales (e.g. due to environmental noise or aging). To truly understand language use in context, it is necessary to characterize how listeners adapt to pervasive variability in their linguistic environments and internal cognitive, emotional, and perceptual states. Investigating factors that make listeners more or less able to adapt to speakers with different speech patterns or to shifts in their own internal states may point to ways to foster these capabilities in both healthy listeners and those with clinical disorders associated with language and/or emotional processing abnormalities, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Importantly, we are committed to providing research and educational opportunities to high school and undergraduate students, particularly students from minority groups underrepresented in the sciences. Materials from the proposed research will be used to create pedagogical materials and activities involving pre-processed behavioral and/or electrophysiological data, to provide students with hands-on experiences with real data and to spark broad interest in psycholinguistics and affective neuroscience.<br/><br/>This project bridges recent developments in psycholinguistics, neuroscience, and affective psychology to explore the effects of external and internal variability on predictive processing during language comprehension. Study 1 uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to ask whether and how temporal expectations can lead to false perceptions of words that, in turn, influence higher-level syntactic predictions in the brain. Study 2 investigates effects of variability in the external linguistic environment, examining whether exposure to speakers with disfluent speech-timing characteristics leads listeners to adapt and update their predictions. Study 3 shifts the focus to listener-internal variability: This study investigates whether variation in listeners? mood states affects the extent to which they rely on contextual prediction vs. stimulus features during sentence processing, building on an emerging literature suggesting that mood alters cognitive processing in other domains. Finally, Study 4 explores effects of individual differences in perceptual abilities on the engagement of predictive mechanisms. In all these cases, listeners are hypothesized to maintain a flexible balance between contextually-driven predictive processing and bottom-up stimulus processing, to adapt to variability in their external environment and internal states. Findings from these studies will elucidate how people navigate both external and internal variability to successfully communicate in ever-changing real-world situations. The proposed research thus takes an important step toward investigating the neural mechanisms of language processing across linguistic and affective contexts.
