2005 — 2008 |
Macdonald, Maryellen C |
R01Activity Code Description: To support a discrete, specified, circumscribed project to be performed by the named investigator(s) in an area representing his or her specific interest and competencies. |
Linking Language Comprehension to Production Patterns @ University of Wisconsin Madison
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This project tests specific hypotheses about dependencies between language comprehension and production, which are typically studied independently. The PI's production-distribution-comprehension (PDC) account holds that utterance planning choices during language production yield distributional patterns in the language, in which certain syntactic structures co-vary with particular word choices, messages, and discourse environments. Comprehenders, through statistical learning during prior comprehension experiences, become highly sensitive to these patterns, and this sensitivity guides comprehension processes. Thus, many aspects of comprehension can ultimately be traced to task demands related to language production. Specific aims of the project include: (1) Link syntactic structure choice in production to mechanisms of sentence planning. (2) Compare the PDC account of comprehension to alternative views of relative clause interpretation. (3) Test the causal relations between production constraints, distributional patterns in the language, and comprehension performance. (4) Relate adult sentence comprehension to statistical learning. (5) Test the current limits of constraint-based models of language comprehension. The PDC approach offers a significant alternative to other views and also may inform language acquisition research by illuminating the role of distributional patterns in child language acquisition. The work also can inform language therapies for brain injured patients in several ways. First, sources of production difficulty are precisely investigated, as are accommodations that unimpaired speakers make in the face of this difficulty. Second, the project investigates the relationship between prior experience with a syntactic construction and comprehension difficulty, which can have implications for the amount and nature of practice that should be provided to patients to improve their comprehension of certain sentence types.
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0.936 |
2005 — 2014 |
Macdonald, Maryellen C |
T32Activity Code Description: To enable institutions to make National Research Service Awards to individuals selected by them for predoctoral and postdoctoral research training in specified shortage areas. |
Training in Language: Acquisition and Adult Performance @ University of Wisconsin-Madison
DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): This application requests support for an interdisciplinary predoctoral and postdoctoral training program in Language Processes, specifically emphasizing the link between child language acquisition and adult language comprehension and production. The project is housed in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The program includes eight training faculty who study a broad range of language comprehension, acquisition, and production processes. The program's motivation, beyond the basic fact that we have an exceptionally large and outstanding group of language faculty, is that we perceive important changes in language research that need to be addressed with a new kind of training. That is, language comprehension, production, and acquisition research has each traditionally been studied in isolation, but new progress in understanding the relationships between theses subfields is beginning to emerge. Training practices are lagging behind these new research efforts, however, and institutional barriers exist that limit the extent to which students are trained in both language acquisition and adult language performance. The highly cohesive group of training program faculty span these research areas and are committed to training the next generation of researchers in a way that emphasizes the growing connections between these fields. The goal is not to create scholars who will necessarily study both acquisition and processing but rather create researchers who consistently consider issues of both the child and adult state in their chosen area of research. Funds are requested to support four predoctoral and one postdoctoral trainees per year. Trainees will enter through the Department of Psychology and will have course requirements in other departments as well. Predoctoral trainees will fulfill all Departmental requirements for the Ph.D. and will in addition participate in activities specifically designed to foster integration of theory and research in acquisition and adult processing, as well as integration of research across typical and atypical populations. Postdoctoral trainees will receive training in areas of language research that are distinct from those that were the focus of their predoctoral work. Training will take place within one of the top-ranked U.S. Psychology Departments and at an institution with outstanding research facilities and resources,
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0.936 |
2011 — 2015 |
Macdonald, Maryellen |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Language Production-Comprehension Linkage @ University of Wisconsin-Madison
This project tests specific hypotheses about the dependencies between language comprehension, acquisition, and production, particularly the role of experience in developing language skills. Whereas the role of experience is well known in vocabulary development, there is very little research on how experience affects sentence comprehension. This gap is very unfortunate because comprehension of complex sentences is critical for success in school and reading, and this domain is particularly affected by language delays or impairments.
The Principal Investigator, Maryellen MacDonald, will use her Production-Distribution-Comprehension (PDC) Framework to guide research on the role of experience in language comprehension. This includes investigations of where experience comes from in the form of documenting speakers' production choices in various situations; why speakers make those utterance choices and not others; what comprehenders can learn from the patterns of utterances that they experience in their language environment; and how knowledge of these patterns shapes subsequent comprehension.
To better understand how language production processes create linguistic patterns in the environment, language production is studied in four distinct language environments: English, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin Chinese. Comprehension processes are studied in these same four languages in a coordinated effort that allows the researchers to relate production choices in each language to comprehension patterns in that language, yielding a much stronger test of claims than with a single language alone. Additional studies investigate how learning from experience shapes language comprehension skill. The research plan will further a number of international collaborations.
This research integrates the study of three typically-distinct fields in language processing (comprehension, production, acquisition), revealing their mutual dependence and how experience shapes processing skill. As a result, this work should provide a foundation for understanding how targeted therapeutic linguistic experiences can best be developed for those with language or reading delays or impairments.
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0.915 |