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name: Ellen Lau
age: 26
sister: Rachel
bf: Thomaz Alvares
city: DC
neighborhood: Mount Pleasant
job: 4th year grad student at U. Maryland Linguistics
contact: ellenlau [at] umd [dot] edu
modern ln
(the promised 'more serious' ;)
For the past few years
I've been particularly interested in understanding the integration of
bottom-up information with predictive and top-down information in perception
and comprehension. The simultaneously serial and hierarchical property of
language and its combination of 'hard' grammatical constraints and 'soft'
statistical constraints make it a great domain for studying this problem.
I really believe that
electrophysiological and functional imaging techniques will be key for
working this out, but we have to know what we’re looking for. I spend some of
my time trying to understand the time course of effects at different lexical
processing stages for these different techniques, so that I have a better
idea about where to look when I manipulate the predictions made available by
the context. Behavioral data is easier to get (if not to interpret), and
lately, with Matt Wagers, I’ve been using behavioral measures on subject-verb
agreement to think about prediction (among other things) in sentence
processing.
courses
LING499A -
Psycholinguistics of Speech (co-taught with Phil Monahan)
publications
Wagers, M.W., Lau, E.F., & Phillips, C. (submitted). Agreement attraction
in comprehension: representations and processes. pdf
Lau, E.F., Rozanova, K., & Phillips, C. (2007). Syntactic prediction and
lexical frequency effects in sentence processing. University of Maryland
Working Papers. pdf
Kazanina, N., Lau, E.F., Lieberman, M., Phillips, C., & Yoshida, M.
(2007). Effect of syntactic constraints on long-distance dependency formation
in backwards anaphora processing. Journal of Memory and Language. pdf
Lau, E. F., Stroud, C., Plesch, S., & Phillips, C. (2006). The role of
prediction in rapid syntactic analysis. Brain & Language. pdf
Resnik, P., Elkiss, A., Lau, E., & Taylor, H. (2005). The Web in
Theoretical Linguistics Research: Two Case Studies Using the Linguist's
Search Engine. Proceedings of the 31st Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics
Society, February 2005. pdf
Lau, E. F. & Ferreira, F. (2005). Lingering effects of disfluent material
on the comprehension of garden path sentences. Language and Cognitive
Processes. pdf
Phillips, C. & Lau, E. F. (2004). Foundational Issues (review article for
R. Jackendoffs Foundations of
Language). Journal of Linguistics, 40, 571-591. pdf
Ferreira, F., Lau, E. F., & Bailey, K. G. D. (2004). Disfluencies,
Language Comprehension, and Tree Adjoining Grammars. Cognitive Science,
28(5), 721-749.pdf
drafts
895 preliminary draft ~ Time-course and localization of syntactic and
semantic anomaly in sentence processing: a within-subjects fMRI/MEG design. draft .. MEG figures
.. fMRI
figures .. fMRI
meta-analysis tables .. bibliography
..
selected presentations
Lau, E., Almeida, D., Hines, P., & Poeppel, D. (2008). A within–subjects
comparison of word and sentence–level MEG responses. Poster presented at the 15th
Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting, San Francisco, CA. pdf
Almeida, D., Lau, E.,
& Poeppel, D. (2008). An MEG study of semantic priming. Poster presented at the 15th
Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting, San Francisco, CA. pdf
Xiang, M., Lau, E.,
& Poeppel, D. (2008). Reversing plausibility (or not): MEG evidence for
processing semantic presupposition and scalarity. Poster presented at the 15th
Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting, San Francisco, CA. pdf
Lau E., Wagers, M.,
Stroud C., & Phillips, C. (2008). Agreement and the subject of confusion.
Talk presented at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Chapel Hill, NC. ppt
Wagers, M., Lau, E.,
& Phillips, C. (2008). Early and late effects of agreement attraction in
comprehension, Poster presented at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference,
Chapel Hill, NC. pdf
Lau, E., Almeida, D.,
Hines, P., & Poeppel, D. (2008). An MEG comparison of word and sentence
level context effects on the N400.
Poster presented at the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing,
Chapel Hill, NC.
Lau, E.F., Wagers, M.W.,
& Phillips, C. (2007). How (not) to get confused in comprehension: the
case of agreement attraction, Talk given at the Architectures and Mechanisms
for Language Conference, 13, Turku, Finland.
Lau, E.F., Yeung, H.H., Hashimoto, R., Braun, A., & Phillips, C. (2006)
Time-course and localization of syntactic and semantic anomaly responses in
sentence processing: a within-subjects fMRI/MEG design. Poster presented at
the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting.
Wagers, M. & Lau, E.F. (2006). Non-intervening attraction and agreement
in comprehension. Poster presented at the 12th Annual Conference on
Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing, Nijmegen, the
Netherlands. pdf
Lau, E.F., Rozanova, K., & Phillips, C. (2006). Differential effects of
lexical surface frequency on reading times in syntactic context. Poster
presented at the 19th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing,
New York, NY. pdf
the
requisite CV
course
presentations & papers (for general perusal and slide-copying)
Lookahead in
Phonological Processing - review of the extent of phonological lookahead
available in production, taking off from Keating & Shattuck-Hufnagel
(2002)
Brief review of
the Morton-Massaro Law - review taking off from ideas in Movellan &
McClelland (2001)
Lau & Monahan,
for Bill Idsardi's class - examination of the analysis-by-synthesis view
of speech perception
awfulwaffle -
adventures in semantic satiation and lexical access
nRouse
- a summary of some of Dave Huber's work
Investigating
the CWH - wherein I review the N400 literature on priming and consider
its import for a 'boring' N400 interpretation
thinking
about timing
visual summary
of ELAN literature. (circa winter 04)
tools
Note: these are documents and slides that I've made largely to organize my
own thoughts about software/methodologies/analysis. I've put them here b/c
they might be helpful to others as well, but I am not a math expert, so they
likely have errors. If you notice anything egregious, please drop me a line.
R intro for
psycholinguists. I am still pretty naive at R, but it is great for large
RT datasets for the stage where you just want to look at your data in a
million different ways. Here I've just got the basics to get started.
getting fMRI. a
ridiculously silly, simple fMRI tutorial powerpoint I made to teach myself.
(beta version: filtering intro)
filtering for
electrophysiological data . Based on the treatment in Steven Luck's
fantastic (2005) book.
filtering
in matlab tutorial 1 - basic fft
filtering
in matlab tutorial 2 - basic filtering
(beta version: artifact rejection)
artifact
rejection for electrophysiological data. Based on Luck 2005.
choosing an artifact
rejection algorithm. A walk-through.
matlab script for
MEG160 data eyeblink artifact rejection--UNFINISHED
CNL
Guide to using FieldTrip for MEG data - work in progress
CNL Guide to using
NUTMEG for MEG-MRI data - work in progress
readingMEGfile.m -
Huan Luo's script for reading in epoch data
epReadFT.m
yoko2timelock.m
good kids
the haircut
my undergraduate website
Thomaz Alvares de Azevedo e Almeida
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