Eszter Ronai
Northwestern University, IL·Psychology
Understanding a sentence means more than knowing what its words mean. Listeners use context to track what is already known, what is new, and what the speaker wants to emphasize, and they draw on social knowledge about words.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
Neuroscience
- Topics
psycholinguistics
information structure
syntax
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Identify the real-time processing signals of focus, the marking of new or emphasized information, in languages with fixed versus flexible word order, using eye-gaze data and statistical modeling.
- Determine how information structure, the tracking of shared versus new information, shapes how speakers order words in less-configurational languages, using eye-tracking production experiments.
- Test whether reading slowdowns when nouns or adjectives seem to mismatch a pronoun's gender reflect the word's social meaning or the surrounding sentence context, using eye-tracking during reading.
- Create and publicly release updated gender-norming data for nouns and the first such norming data for adjectives, along with de-identified data and code.
More about the research
This work uses eye tracking, which records where people look as they hear or read language, to study how grammar, word meaning and context combine as people process language in real time.
Why it matters
Knowing how people use context to understand sentences could help build AI language models and translation software that handle context better across languages. The publicly shared word-norming data will give other researchers a resource for studying how social bias, such as gender stereotypes, shapes everyday reading.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Satoshi Tomioka
University of Delaware, DE·Social Science
Test whether the difficulty of alternative word orders comes from filler-gap dependency formation, the effort of linking a displaced phrase back to the position it moved from, using self-paced reading across several sentence types.
Emily Morgan
University of California-Davis, CA·Psychology
Build computational models of how speakers combine general constraints, such as the length of the receiver, with verb-specific preferences when choosing between the two English dative structures for verbs like give and send.
Kyle Mahowald
University of Texas at Austin, TX·Social Science
Measure how speakers of a variety of languages choose deictic words such as "this," "that," "here," and "there" to refer to objects and locations, using cross-linguistic behavioral experiments.
The school
Northwestern University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 536 research doctorates a year.
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