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modern ln
There’s a volume about vision with a great title: ‘The
first half-second’. That really captures the way I think about my research in
language processing (although I’d probably want to get at least the first
three-quarters): I want to build a better model of the timeline of access and
integration mechanisms that are instantiated in that first window of time
after a word is encountered in a sentence context. I think it is pretty clear
nowadays that any model that even begins to approximate the sequence of
events in this window is going to have to incorporate top-down and predictive
sources of information at an early stage, so for the past few years I've been
particularly interested in understanding how and when this kind of
information is combined with bottom-up 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 good domain for studying this problem. I’m an experimentalist, so I work on designing the
experiments that will inform the model. I believe that electrophysiological
and functional imaging techniques will be key for understanding these issues,
so currently I spend a lot of my time trying to understand what the imaging
tells us about the interpretation of the electrophysiology and vice versa.
With Diogo Almeida and Nuria
AbdulSabur I’ve been doing MEG and simultaneous
MEG-EEG experiments to try to bridge the fMRI-EEG gap. With Matt Wagers, I’ve
been using self-paced reading time and judgment data to think about syntactic
prediction (among other things) in sentence processing. courses
Lau, E.F., Almeida, D., Hines, P., Poeppel, D. (2009). A
lexical basis for context effects: evidence from the N400. Brain and
Language. Wagers, M.W., Lau, E.F., & Phillips, C. (2009). Agreement
attraction in comprehension: representations and processes. Journal of
Memory and Language. Lau, E.F., Phillips, C., & Poeppel, D. (2008). A
cortical network for semantics: (de)constructing the
N400. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Lau, E.F., Rozanova, K., &
Phillips, C. (2007). Syntactic
prediction and lexical frequency effects in sentence processing.
University of Maryland Working Papers. 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. Lau, E. F., Stroud, C., Plesch,
S., & Phillips, C. (2006). The
role of prediction in rapid syntactic analysis. Brain & Language. 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. Lau, E. F. & Ferreira, F. (2005). Lingering
effects of disfluent material on the comprehension
of garden path sentences. Language and Cognitive Processes. Phillips, C. & Lau, E. (2004). Foundational
Issues (review article for R. Jackendoff’s Foundations of Language). Journal
of Linguistics. Ferreira, F., Lau, E. F., & Bailey, K. G. D. (2004). Disfluencies, Language Comprehension, and Tree Adjoining
Grammars. Cognitive Science.
Lau, E. The
predictive nature of language comprehension. Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of Maryland. Supervised by Professor Colin Phillips. selected presentations Lau, E. (2009). Unpacking the N400 with MEG. MEG and
Language Workshop (MEGLANG), Neurospin, Saclay, France. Lau, E.F., Wagers, M., & Phillips, C. (2009). The
consequences of number agreement on number interpretation. Poster presented at
the 22nd Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing, Davis, CA. Wagers, M., Lau, E.F., Stroud, C., McElree,
B., & Phillips, C. (2009). Encoding syntactic predictions: evidence from
the dynamics of agreement. Paper presented at the 22nd Annual
Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Davis, CA. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.
(for citations and slide-copying)
under
construction
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