Current Research Projects
- Morphological Structure Building and Semantic Context. With Alexander Pollatsek
We are using eyetracking measures to investigate how the meanings of ambiguous tri-morphemic strings like unlockable are computed.
Experiment 1 embedded such ambiguous adjectives in contexts that favored one or the other interpretation (able to be locked, or not able to be locked). We found that prior context had no effects on the earliest stages of morphological interpretation, but instead found evidence to suggest that default parsing mechanisms combine with sub-string occurrence frequencies to determine an initial parse, which may then be revised to fit the context.
Experiment 2 compares ambiguous trimorphs (unlockable) with words that are structurally ambiguous, but only have one semantically coherent parse (unsinkable) in order to further investigate the functions of a morphological parsing mechanism, and to tease apart morphological and semantic well-formedness considerations. We again find evidence for an initial default parsing preference for the ambiguous adjectives. - Processing Mass and Count nouns in English and French With Ashley Benatar
Both English and French distinguish mass and counts nouns morphosyntactically. In English, mass nouns can occur with no overt determiner, while count nouns require a determiner. In French count nouns take the determiners le/la and un/une, while mass nouns take du/de la. In both languages, adding a plural morpheme to a mass noun either converts it to a count noun (two waters) or makes it ungrammatical (two furnitures), and in both languages there are many nouns that can appear equally easily in both mass and count context (stone,café). We are conducting single word lexical decision and self-paced reading experiments to investigate what, if any, processing differences distinguish mass from count nouns in these two languages.
- The Ingredients of Lexical Aspect With E. Matthew Husband and Alan Beretta
Whether an event is interpreted as proceeding towards a definite end point or not is a function both of lexical semantic properties of the verb and of compositional/structural properties of the direct object DP with which that verb combines. We have been investigating these two sources of telicity and how they combine together in real time in a number of experiments, using lexical decision, self-paced reading, eye-tracking and MEG.
- Decomposing Irregular Allomorphs With Alec Marantz and Joseph Fuchter
Recent work establishing an evoked neuromagnetic response peaking approximately 170ms after the onset of visual presented linguistic material and originating in left fusiform gyrus that is sensitive to form based morphological constituent detection (Sollomyak and Marantz (2009), Zweig and Pylkkänen (2008)) makes it possible to test the predictions made in my dissertation that even irregular allomorphs are subject to early decomposition. We are currently running both a masked priming and a single word lexical decision experiment designed to investigate this process.
- English Compound Processing and the Early Visual System. With Roberto de Almeida and Michael von Grünau.
We're currently analysing MEG data collected in Montreal from an experiment manipulating lexical complexity and the alignment of potential morphological boundaries with visual hemifield boundaries. The goal is to better understand the mechanisms involved in early detection of morphological constituents in visual linguistic processing by investigating compounds (teacup) and pseudocompounds (carpet).
Papers
In preparation/Manuscripts
- Stockall, L. and Morris, J. Masked priming with irregularly and regularly inflected primes: a reply to Crepaldi et al.
- Stockall, L. and Benatar, A. Processing the Mass/Count Distinction in English and French.
- Stockall, L. and Husband, E.M. How Lexical Is Lexical Aspect?
- Stockall, L. and Husband, E.M. Processing Different Sources of Repeated Event Interpretations
- Stockall, L. de Almeida, R., and von Grünau, M. Compound Constituency Detection by the Right and Left Fusiform Gyrus.
Submitted/In Press
- Husband, E.M., Stockall, L. & Beretta, A. (submitted) VP-Internal Event Composition: Processing Evidence for Phrase-Level Event Interpretation. 40pgs [pdf]
- Husband, E.M., Stockall, L. & Beretta, A. (submitted) The Online Composition of Events. [pdf] 56pgs.
Published
- Pollatsek, A., Drieghe, D., Stockall, L. and de Almeida, R. (2010) The Interpretation of Ambiguous Trimorphemic Words in Sentence Context. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 17(1), 88-94. [pdf]
- Stockall, L. and Marantz, A. (2006) A single route, full decomposition model of morphological complexity: MEG evidence. The Mental Lexicon.1:1, 85-123. [pdf]
- Stockall, L. Stringfellow, A. and Marantz, A. (2004) The precise timecourse of lexical activation: MEG measurements of the effects of frequency, probability and density in lexical decision. Brain and Language. 90:1-3, 88-94. [pdf]
- Ko, H. Wagner, M., Stockall, L., Kouider, S., and A. Marantz, (2004). Form vs. Meaning in Visual Word Recognition: An MEG study using Masked Priming. In Halgren E, Ahlfors S, Hämäläinen M. & Cohen D. (eds.) Biomag 14, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Biomagnetism, p 300.
- Stockall, L. and A. Marantz, (2004). The English Irregular Past Tense: MEG evidence for morphological decomposition. In In Halgren E, Ahlfors S, Hämäläinen M. & Cohen D. (eds.) Biomag 14, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Biomagnetism, p 308.
- Stockall, L. (2004) Magnetoencephalographic investigations of morphological identity and irregularity. PhD thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [pdf]
Recent Presentations
- 2010, March with Ashley Benatar. Retrieving and Processing the Mass/Count Distinction. Poster given at CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, 2010
- 2010, March with E. Matthew Husband. Lexical Telicity? Processing Evidence for and against Verbal Telicity. Poster given at CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, 2010
- 2009, October. How understanding 'undoable' might be doable. Talk given at Hampshire College, Cognitive Science Talk Series.
- 2009, February. What's in a Word? How and When and Where we Process Morphological Constituents. Talk given at the University of Ottawa.
- 2008, October. Building Events: Online Investigations of Verbal and Nominal Contributions to Aktionsart. Poster presented at Verb Concepts Workshop, Montreal.
- 2008, March. with E. Matthew Husband and Alan Beretta. The semantics and pragmatics of repeated event interpretations: eye movement investigations.. Poster given at CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, 2008. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
- 2008, February. Building Aspectual Interpretations. Talk given at The Polinsky Lab, Harvard University.
- 2007, November. Building events: how the syntax and semantics of termination are computed in real time. Talk given to the Concordia Linguistics Student's Association Collquia Series [slides:pdf]
- 2006, September. with E. Matthew Husband and Alan Beretta. Aspectual Computation: Evidence for Immediate Commitment. Talk given at AMLaP, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Teaching
- CS-0125 Language Acquisition
- CS-0209 Linguistic Field Methods
- LING353 - Psycholinguistics
- LING353 - Psycholinguistics - see Moodle for web resources
- LING398P - Lexical Categories
- LING425 - Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar - see Moodle for web resources
- LING353 - Psycholinguistics. Concordia University.
- PSY493(W)-Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Michigan State University.
Spring 2010
Fall 2009
Winter 2009
Winter 2008
Fall 2007
Winter 2007
Fall 2005
Free tools I use to:
design materials
- N-Watch: Colin Davis' program computes lexical neighbourhood statistics and many other lexical properties. Invaluable for creating well-controlled materials. Only works on Windows.
- VIEW (Variation in English Words and Phrases): Mark Davies' handy web interface that makes searching the British National Corpus easy
- COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English) also by Mark Davies, with a very similar interface to the VIEW site.
- ARC Nonword Database: Generates nonword materials that conform to a wide choice of properties. Maintained by Macquarie University.
- The Linguist's Search Engine: A tool written by Philip Resnik and Aaron Elkiss "that makes it possible to retrieve naturally occurring sentences from the World Wide Web on the basis of lexical content and syntactic structure." [link is currently broken, but I hope it will be fixed soon]
- Speech and Hearing Lab Neighborhood Database: From Washington University in St. Louis.
- The Word Frequency Lists: Lists of very frequent words in a variety of corpora compiled by Rob Waring.
- The Phonotactic Probability Calculator: by Mike Vitevitch at the University of Kansas.
- Semantic Space Model Demo: A tool for calculating the number of semantic neighbors a word has as deteremined by the frequency distributions of words occuring in the environment of the target word in large corpora. By Scott MacDonald.
- The MRC Psycholinguistic Database: Great tool for either generating or rating stimulus items based on up to 25 different properties with any of dozens of restrictions.
- GSearch: A corpus search tool kit designed to extract sentences from online corpora that have not been tagged. Developed at the University of Edinburgh.
- The LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) interface tool: Hosted at UC Boulder, this tool provides an easy interface to doing LSA.
- The English Lexicon Project: The English Lexicon Project (supported by the National Science Foundation) affords access to a large set of lexical characteristics, along with behavioral data from visual lexical decision and naming studies of 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords.
- The SUBTLEX project at Universiteit Gent. Frequency measures for American English, Dutch and Chinese derived from movie subtitles.
- Lexique: Developed by Boris New and Christophe Pallier, Lexique is a database and a search tool for norming French lexical stimuli.
- IPhOD: The Irvine Phonotactic Online Dictionary. A large collection of English words and pseudowords suitable for research on phonological processes.
run experiments
- DMDX: experiment running software written by Jonathon Foster. DMDX has extremely reliable timing control, making it the best software available for priming experiments, where stimulus duration and ISI are of the utmost importance. Only runs on Windows.
- Psyscope X: the OSX compatible version of Psyscope, a software package designed for running psychology experiments by Jonathan Cohen, Matthew Flatt, Brian MacWhinney and Jefferson Provost at Carnegie Melon. The GU interface takes a bit of work to master, but it's pretty flexible and reliable.
- WebExp.2: software written at The University of Edinburgh to run experiments over the internet. Allows the collection of timing data as well as survey/norming type data.
- Linger: written by Doug Rohde, based on TCL/Tk this tool is particularly well suited to self-paced reading experiments.
analyse data
- R: command-line based statistical analysis package. A good way to be 100% certain you know exactly how your analyses are calculated. Shravan Vasishth's introductory stats textbook The foundations of statistics: A simulation-based approach uses R to illustrate the relevant concepts and analysis options, so it's a great way to learn R. Harald Baayan's textbook Analyzing Linguistic Data: A practical introduction to Statistics using R does exactly what the title suggests. (an earlier version is available as a pdf on Baayen's website)
report results
- LaTeX: For document preparation. Especially useful for linguists as it allows tree drawing, ipa fonts, semantic denotation writing, autosegmental phonological representations, perfectly aligned glosses, etc without all the fuss and bother and ugliness of Word. Essex University's Latex4Linguists page is a great resource for getting started and finding the right packages
- Google Documents: A great way to collaborate on projects. I use the spreadsheet app to organize subject recruitment, scheduling and running, and the document app for everything from planning classes, to maintaining a tech report on an experiment in progress to collaborating on the final write up. It's great for grading papers too. Students can just share the document with me, and then access my comments at any time - no attachments required.
- Mendeley: A excellent references management tool. Combines a desktop client with automatic sync with a server to build a database of references that is accessible online as well. Imports from and exports to bibtex format, and uses google scholar metadata to automatically fill in reference fields. Still in beta, but already a powerful and useful tool.
organize my life
- Pathfinder by Cocoatech. Everything Finder.app ought to be and then some. Best file browser/management tool ever. Not actually free, but totally worth every penny. I can't imagine working without this tool.
- TeuxDeux. Finally, a todo tool that just works. No fancy bells and whistles, just a clean, simple interface. The only todo list tool I've ever stuck with for more than a week.
- Postbox. Another not-free app, but again, totally worth it. A desktop client that auto-synchs with gmail - finally I don't have to process the same email multiple times on different machines.