Emily Morgan
University of California-Davis, CA·Psychology
People constantly say sentences no one has said before, built by recombining familiar words and phrases. Choosing how to phrase a new idea means weighing two kinds of knowledge.
- Fields
Psychology
Computer Science
Social Science
- Topics
psycholinguistics
computational linguistics
language processing
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2027
What they work on
- 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.
- Test these models of real-time sentence production with controlled psycholinguistic experiments.
- Model language change across generations to examine how speakers' preferences and language structure co-evolve and become jointly optimized.
- Create publicly available, manually annotated corpora of naturally occurring verb uses to support future linguistics research.
More about the research
One is general rules that apply to every word. The other is quirky habits tied to individual words. How the mind balances these to produce speech that is clear and natural is still an open question in the science of language. This project combines linguistics, psychology and computational modeling to study that balance in real time. It also looks at how the same balance shapes the way languages change over generations.
Why it matters
Understanding how speakers combine general rules with word-specific habits could inform better diagnosis and treatment of language disorders. It could also improve second-language teaching and the teaching of related skills such as programming. The free annotated verb corpora will let researchers with few resources for data annotation study many questions in linguistics.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Elena Koulidobrova
Central Connecticut State University, CT·Social Science
Build treebanks, collections of sentences annotated for grammatical structure in the Universal Dependencies format, that capture how evidential markers (grammatical signals of information source) and focus features appear in sentences.
Eszter Ronai
Northwestern University, IL·Psychology
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.
Nan Ratner
University of Maryland, MD·Psychology
Identify the syntactic, vocabulary and spelling features that distinguish the writing of students with developmental language disorder (DLD) from typical peers across grades 6–11, by annotating the PERSUADE essay corpus utterance by utterance.
The school
University of California-Davis: 49 labs on PI Pages, $1.0B a year on research, 647 research doctorates a year.
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