Word meaning and sentence comprehension

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Language is a major part of what makes us human. The broad objective of my research is to understand how people interpret what they hear and read, how this knowledge develops in children, and how it becomes degraded due to brain impairments. My research is roughly divided into two parts. In one part, I and my collaborators study people's memory for the meaning of words that refer to living things such as dog, and nonliving things such as toaster. To do this, we use "neural networks", which are models of mental processing that are written as computer programs. We have built a series of neural networks that produce the meaning of words like toaster given how the word is spelled or pronounced. We study how our models work and then use that knowledge to come up with predictions that we test on human participants. This testing typically involves looking at the time it takes for people to answer questions like, "Does a shirt have a pocket?" or "Does the word dog refer to something you can touch?" We also damage our models by altering the program so that part of the simulated mind no longer works correctly. We then test whether the damaged model mimics the performance of people who have suffered brain damage.People's knowledge of the meaning of verbs like arresting and adopting is an important part of their ability to understand language. We study how verbs and nouns are linked to knowledge of events in memory, and how that knowledge is organized in our mind. We use both computer simulations and reading and listening experiments to gain insight into these processes.Although our work is primarily theoretical in nature, it has practical implications. Detailed theories of language comprehension help in developing better methods of teaching children how to listen, speak, read, and write. In addition, studying patients' performance and damaged models can provide important insights into these conditions. For example, it is possible to test different ways of retraining the models after they are damaged. These studies can then be used as a guide for developing rehabilitation programs after damage has occurred.