General research program

Research in the Gibson Lab (“TedLab”) is aimed at investigating (1) why human languages look the way they do; (2) the relationship between culture and cognition, including language; and, most generally, (3) how people learn, represent and process language.

We use a variety of methods, including behavioral experiments (e.g., reading and listening studies, many simple methods in working with remote populations, dual-task experiments, individual differences studies), statistical modeling and corpus analyses.  In collaboration with other labs we also use functional MRI, event-related potentials (ERPs) and eye-tracking.

The major lines of research pursued in the lab:

1. Information processing and cross-linguistic universals

2. The relationship between culture and cognition / language

3. Language processing

   1. What are the informational constraints that affect language processing? The informational constraints we have investigated include:
      • Syntactic information
      • Lexical information
      • Plausibility (world knowledge) information
      • Prosodic information
      • Pragmatic inference
      • Discourse coherence information
      • Information structure
   2. Resource constraints (the working memory system underlying language processing)
      • What is the nature of the resource constraints in language processing and what is the best way of quantifying them?
      • To what extent is the working memory system underlying language processing domain-specific? The language constraints?
   3. Methodological questions
      • The value of doing quantitative research in syntax and semantics
      • Meta-analysis in syntactic priming research