RESEARCH INTERESTS
Language, Memory, and Attention
Collaborators: Duane Watson and Aaron Benjamin
Since people cannot attend to and remember everything, they must identify the most important pieces of information they hear. I am investigating how various cues in speech, like prosodic stress and disfluency, affect what listeners pay attention to and what listeners remember. For example, an utterance like "The REPORTER won an award for covering the robbery" suggests that what's most important is that the reporter, and not someone else, won the award. But, "The reporter won an award for covering the ROBBERY" suggests that what's important is that the award was won for covering the robbery, and not some other story. I am investigating exactly how these cues affect memory and how the use of this information differs across the lifespan.
Publications and presentations from this project:
- Fraundorf, S. H., Watson, D. G., & Benjamin, A. S. (in preparation). Is contrastive accenting really contrastive?: Effects of pitch accenting on memory for a discourse.
- Fraundorf, S. H., Watson, D. G., & Benjamin, A. S. (2009, March). Is contrastive accenting really CONTRASTIVE?: Effects of contrastive accenting on processing in a discourse. Poster presented at CUNY 2009: Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Davis, CA. [ PDF ]
- Fraundorf, S. H. (2009, March). Are contrastive accents contrastive?: Effects of pitch accenting on memory for discourse. Oral presentation to the Language Processing Brown Bag at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- Fraundorf, S. H., Watson, D. G., & Benjamin, A. S. (2008, November). Effects of prosodic stress on memory in language comprehension. Poster presented at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago, IL. [ PDF ]
- Fraundorf, S. H., Watson, D. G., & Benjamin, A. S. (2008, April). Effect of pitch accents on memory in language comprehension. Poster presented at Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody, Ithaca, NY.
- Fraundorf, S. H., Watson, D. G., & Benjamin, A. S. (2008, March). Effect of pitch accents on memory in language comprehension. Poster presented at CUNY 2008: Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Chapel Hill, NC. [ PDF ]
Disfluency
Collaborators: Duane Watson, Nazbanou Nozari, Gary Dell
A second line of research concerns disfluencies, or interruptions in regular speech. When we speak, we often encounter problems like saying "uh" and "um," repeating words we have already said, or interrupting ourselves to correct something we said previously. Although these are different types of disfluencies, we currently do not know much about how these types are the same or different from one another. I am conducting work exploring how various kinds of disfluencies differ and how they may reflect different problems or processes in language production.
Publications and presentations from this project:
- Fraundorf, S. H., & Watson, D. G. (submitted). Alice's adventures in um-derland: Message-level influences on disfluency production.
- Fraundorf, S. H., & Watson, D. G. (2008, June). Dimensions of variation in disfluency production in discourse. In J. Ginzburg, P. Healey, & Y. Sato (Eds.), Proceedings of LONDIAL 2008, the 12th Workshop on the Semantics and Pragmatics of Dialogue, pp. 131-138. London: King's College London.
- Fraundorf, S. H., & Watson, D. G. (2008, March). Alice's adventures in um-derland: Dimensions of variation in disfluency production. Poster presented at CUNY 2008: Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Chapel Hill, NC. [ PDF ]
- Fraundorf, S. H. (2008, February). Through thee, uh, looking glass: Dimensions of variation in disfluency production. Oral presentation to the Language Processing Brown Bag at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
- Fraundorf, S. H. (2007, August). Alice's adventures in um-derland: Dimensions of variation in disfluency production. Oral presentation to the cognitive division of the Department of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Executive Attention and Language Acquisition
Collaborators: Mary Rothbart, Michael Posner, Brad Sheese, Lauren White
Individual differences in executive attention have been found to affect how children acquire language, but the specific ways in which attention affects language acquisition are still unclear. One possibility is that attention helps with the information processing demands of vocabulary acquisition, such as attending to new words and stimuli in the environment and mapping those words to the stimuli. We are currently exploring the relationship between executive attention and language acquisition in greater depth as part of a longitudinal study of the first four years of life.
Publications and presentations from this project:
- Fraundorf, S. H., Sheese, B. E., White, L. K., Rothbart, M. K., & Posner, M. I. (2008, May). Dissociable effects of attention and parent-child interaction on language acquisition. Poster presented at the 2008 meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Chicago, IL. [ PDF ]
- Fraundorf, S. H., Sheese, B. E., White, L. K., Rothbart, M. K., & Posner, M. I. (2007, May). Brain derived neurotrophic factor gene polymorphism associated with language acquisition. Poster presented at the 2007 meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL. [ PDF ]
- Sheese, B. E., Fraundorf, S. H., White, L. K., Rothbart, M. K., & Posner, M. I. (2007, April). Language development and executive attention in infancy. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston, MA.