Stephani Foraker's Home Page

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Stephani Foraker

Assistant Professor, Fall 08 Postdoctoral fellow

forakesm@buffalostate.edu sforaker@uchicago.edu

Department of Psychology Department of Psychology

Buffalo State College The University of Chicago

1300 Elmwood Ave. 5848 S. University Ave.

Classroom Bldg A309 Green 309

Buffalo, NY 14222 Chicago, IL 60637

current c.v.

research

Humans seem to learn and use language effortlessly. Some aspects of this ability may be unique to language, with its own special operating principles, but my research is based on the point of view that memory and cognitive processes play a significant role in language processing. Understanding and producing language are remarkably complex processes that involve the interaction of domain-general and language-specific aspects, at many different levels.

How do we understand language? To answer this question, my research focuses on two characteristics of how domain-general principles of memory underlie language use. My primary focus is on the cognitive mechanisms that constrain and support language comprehension, such as the limited capacity of focal attention, and retrieval from working memory. My second focus is on the semantic content of representations during on-line comprehension. Our semantic memory system plays a key role in providing information that is critical for interpreting meaning.

Current questions include:

Can a reader or listener keep more than one entity active in focal attention while continuing to process subsequent information?
Do speakers’ gestures reflect the difference between introducing an entity for the first time and subsequently referring back to it later in a discourse?
If an entity is salient and hence more available in memory, is there also increased access to semantically related properties of that entity, even if they are irrelevant for that discourse context?
Are the various meanings of a word stored separately and retrieved during comprehension, or are they constructed “on the fly,” with context guiding the filling out of an underspecified core meaning?
If an entity is an unacceptable referent based on the grammar of a language, can it nonetheless pose interference for interpreting a pronoun?

To study these issues, I investigate language comprehension in its various forms: from written text, its most stripped down mode, through the spoken message, where prosodic aspects of the voice come into play, to a more holistic and embodied form, which incorporates the properties and timing of hand gestures that accompany talk.

collaborators

Brian McElree Susan Goldin-Meadow Howard Nusbaum Gregory Murphy Terry Regier David McNeill & Susan Duncan

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail.

- Abraham Maslow

teaching

Buffalo State:

Psychology of Language. Fall 2008.

Research Methods. Fall 2008.

Sensation & Perception. Fall 2008.

Instructor:

Research Methods, University of Chicago, 2008

Experimental Psychology, National-Louis University, 2008

Cognitive Development, National-Louis University, 2007

Psychology of Language, University of Chicago, 2004

Cognition, New York University, 2003, 2004

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

- Sydney J. Harris

publications and current projects

Publications

Foraker, S., Nusbaum, H. C., & Schoeneman, S. (under review). Prominence facilitates retrieval by increasing the distinctiveness of referents in memory.

Foraker, S. & McElree, B. (under review). Speed-accuracy tradeoff modeling of language comprehension: Understanding dependencies relies on direct access memory representations. (invited by Language and Linguistics Compass)

Foraker, S., Regier, T., Khetarpal, N., Perfors, A., & Tenenbaum, J. (accepted). Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric “one.” Cognitive Science.

Nusbaum H., Foraker, S., & Fenn, K. (in press). Working memory and language processing. To appear in P. C. Hogan (Ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Foraker, S., & McElree, B. (2007). The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Active versus passive representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 357-383. [pdf]

Foraker, S., Regier, T., Khetarpal, N., Perfors, A., & Tenenbaum, J. (2007). Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric one. In D. S. McNamara and J. G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf]

Foraker, S. (2004). The mechanisms involved in the prominence of referent representations during pronoun coreference. ProQuest Dissertations.

Foraker, S. (2003). The processing of logophoric reflexives shows discourse and locality constraints. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Parasessions, 2003. [pdf]

McElree, B., Foraker, S., & Dyer, L. (2003). Memory structures that subserve sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 67-91. [pdf]

Current Projects

Foraker, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (in preparation). How gestures reflect discourse structure: Introducing versus referring back to a referent.

Foraker, S., & Murphy, G. L. (in preparation). Polysemy in sentence comprehension: Effects of meaning dominance.

Foraker, S. & McElree, B. (in preparation). Prominence and parallelism in pronoun resolution: Evidence from eye-tracking.

McNeill, D., Duncan, S., Loehr, D., & Foraker, S. (in progress). Coordination of prosody and gesture production: For speakers or listeners?

Foraker, S. (in progress). Animacy and gender effects on the time course of binding constraints: Eye-tracking evidence.

Foraker, S. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (in progress). Gesture and discourse: Do comprehenders use speakers’ gestures to understand co-reference?

selected Spoken Presentations

Foraker, S. (2008). Memory search in language comprehension. Talk presented at the 80^th Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, May 1-3. Chicago, IL.

Foraker, S., Regier, T., Khetarpal, N., Perfors, A., & Tenenbaum, J. (2007). Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric one. Talk presented at the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, August 2-4, Nashville, TN.

Foraker, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2007). Gesture and discourse: How we use our hands to refer back. Talk presented at the 3rd International Society for Gesture Studies Conference: Integrating Gestures, June 18-22, Chicago, IL.

Foraker, S., Nusbaum, H., & Schoeneman, S. (2007). Re-accessing representations: Specificity of meaning for prominent and non-prominent concepts. Talk presented at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, March 29-31, La Jolla, CA.

Foraker, S. (2003). The processing of logophoric reflexives shows discourse and locality constraints. Talk presented at the Chicago Linguistic Society Conference, April 10-12, Chicago, IL.

McElree, B., & Foraker, S. (2000). Co-occurrence frequency and plausibility constraints do not directly affect the time-course of parsing operations. Talk presented at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, September 20-23. Leiden, The Netherlands.

selected Posters

Foraker, S. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2007). Gesture and discourse: How we use our hands to refer back. The 20^th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, August 2-4, Nashville, TN.

Foraker, S. (2007). Explicit versus implicit prosody: Effects on pronoun interpretation. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, March 29-31, La Jolla, CA.

Foraker, S. & McElree, B. (2006). The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Availability versus accessibility. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, March 23-25, New York, USA.

Foraker, S., & McElree, B. (2005). On the memory structures underlying prominence during coreference resolution. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, March 31-April 2, Tucson, AZ.

Bencini, G., McElree, B., & Foraker, S. (2004). The effect of animacy on the time course of filler-gap resolution in Wh- Questions. Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference, September 16-18, Aix, France.

Foraker, S. (2004). Syntactic focus and first-mention status affect pronoun coreference. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, March 24-27, College Park, MD.

Foraker, S. & McElree, B. (2001). The effects of co-occurrence frequency on the time-course of parsing operations. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, March 15-17, Philadelphia, PA.