NPI and Quantifier Processing:
There is considerable diversity in the types of NPI licensors and NPI themselves. Data indicates that elements associated with sentential negation don’t behave like negative quantifiers in processing as they do not trigger illusions of grammatically for NPI when in inaccessible positions. Further evidence shows that negative quantifiers embedded more deeply than sentential negation elements can still allow for illusory readings. In this domain I am interested in what parsing procedures specific to quantifiers could give rise to this relatively narrow illusion profile, and what the NPI illusion might tell us about these procedures more generally.
Generalized Polarity Illusion:
Beyond simply NPI, there are number of elements that are sensitive to polarity at various levels and positions within the sentence. Two additional cases are that of PPI, which are generally phobic to NPI licensing environments, and tag questions. Early results indicate that PPI are subject to illusory anti-licensing in the same environments that NPI illusion occurs in, and that intervening polarity changing elements also modulate the acceptability of tag questions. Given these results, a new formulation of a more generalize polarity illusion might be more appropriate than a narrowly defined NPI illusion.
Scope Processing:
Related to my work on NPI and the role of quantifiers, I also work on the issue of how scope is processed online. Like many of the interesting phenomenon in psycholinguistics, resolving scope online poses a challenging problem in parsing due to the number of syntactic, semantic and contextual influences on scope interpretation as well as the fact that scope shifting is largely covert. In my research I perform experiments that aim to show that the human sentence processor tries out many scope configurations while working through a sentence, rather than avoiding non-surface scope or waiting until the end of the input.
Ellipsis and Missing Content:
Another stream of my work looks at how we resolve cases where sentences appear to include content that isn’t overtly present. In this domain I’ve looked at ellipsis and gapping phenomena from the perspectives of sentence processing and formal linguistics. By investigating these phenomena we can get a better sense of human languages perform long distance operations over sentence structures and better understand the linkages between form and meaning.
