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June 28, 2008
PhD Thesis
My PhD thesis is now available: it is titled Context Effects in Language Production: Models of Syntactic Priming in Dialogue Corpora.
The basic question I'm answering is: How and why are we influenced by another person's structure as we listen to them? I look at large collections of every-day conversations between people. What happens is that we adapt to our conversational partner as we speak. Interestingly, I find that those adapting more also do better at carrying out a task: adaptation is helpful and necessary. Such adaptation is important because it gives us insight into how the brain processes and produces natural language: only the structural elements that our brain discovers can lead to adaptation. I use computer models to first discover and quantify adaptation in large datasets (with thousands of recorded dialogues between people), and then to simulate what goes on in our brains.
A more scientific abstract is available here.
Posted by dr at June 28, 2008 5:49 PM