What is the nature of the mental representation of what we read? How do we integrate new information from each sentence with the representation of the prior discourse? What basic memory processes underlie the integration of new with existing information? These questions drive much of the research in the Language Processing Lab. Some of the more-specific current research questions we are studying are described below:

Processing and representing negation

Negation presents an interesting problem from the point of view of mental representation. The thing being negated is explicitly realized in the linguistic stimuli, but the negation itself is like a mental instruction to delete that same thing. How do languages users mentally represent the essentially conflicting nature of negation?

Comprehension and enjoyment of narratives

How do we read between the lines? What are the cognitive processes that allow us to build a rich mental representation of stories, a representation that includes far more information than is explicitly presented? And what aspects of narratives lead to increases in (or decrements in) enjoyment?