Clifton, Charles Jr. Professor. Ph.D., University of Minnesota (1964). Cognitive Area. His research concentrates on psycholinguistics, especially sentence comprehension. He currently conducts experimental studies of language comprehension in adults, collaborating since the early 1980's with Prof. Lyn Frazier of the Linguistics Department. His research examines how a human's knowledge of grammar is brought to bear in language comprehension. The research uses various experimental techniques, including eye movement monitoring, manipulation and measurement of prosody in auditory language comprehension, and a variety of on-line and off-line techniques for studying the reading process. Current questions of particular interest include the existence of distinct types of sentence parsing processes for different types of phrases (resulting in the publication, with Lyn Frazier, of a theoretical monograph,Construal), the roles that prosody can play in sentence parsing and discourse comprehension, the validity of a structure-based "depth-first" theory of sentence comprehension (as contrasted with competitive, constraint-based "breadth-first" theories), and the nature of processing long-distance dependencies. Dr. Clifton's research is currently supported by a grant from NIH (four years, approximately $300,000 direct costs, held jointly with Lyn Frazier). He has been Area Head, Division Head, Director of the Psychology Training Grant, Director of the Training Grant in Psycholinguistics (NIH), and Department Chair. Dr. Clifton teaches the second semester of the graduate core course and graduate courses in language and cognitive processes, and has jointly taught both graduate and undergraduate psycholinguistics courses with faculty in the Department of Linguistics. His research collaborations with other faculty include extensive work with Drs. Frazier and Roeper of the Linguistics Department as well as with Drs. Rayner and Pollatsek of the Cognitive Area. Dr. Clifton has served on numerous editorial boards for cognitive and developmental research journals, was an associate editor Memory & Cognition and is currently associate editor of Journal of Memory and Language. He has been a regular member of the NSF and AFOSR research review panels and occasional guest member of several NIH, NIMH, and NSF panels.

Davis, G. Albyn.Professor, Communciation Disorders. Ph.D., Ohio University, 1972. At the University of Memphis, he directed a 7-year VA Education & Training grant. During this period, he directed various research projects published primarily in the proceedings of the Clinical Aphasiology Conference. His research has focused on pragmatic approaches to aphasia rehabilitation and narrative production after right hemisphere stroke and closed head injury. Along with Jeannie Wilcox, he developed an approach to treatment called Promoting Aphasics' Communicative Effectiveness (PACE). A book on pragmatic rehabilitation resulted from this work. He has also written a text on aphasia that is currently being rewritten as a new book. His overriding interest has been in training speech-language pathologists on the subject of psycholinguistics, and he developed courses in this area in Memphis and Massachusetts. Currently, he has submitted a grant to the James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis concerning the application of lexical decision tasks to treatment of word-finding deficits in aphasia (C. Clifton, consultant).

De Villiers, Jill. Professor, Department of Psychology, Smith College. PhD, Psychology, Harvard 1974. Dr. De Villiers is currently involved in several different lines of research, with the common thread of interest being in the acquisition of complex syntax by young children. Dr de Villiers collaborates with Professor Tom Roeper of the U.Mass Linguistics department on an NIH grant to study the acquisition of the language for describing mental events, namely, the child's mastery of the complex syntax and semantics of mental and communication verbs and their complements. They have a particular interest in how the linguistic acquisition is connected to the child's mastery of "theory of mind". With Peter de Villiers, she is studying theory of mind development in deaf children and its dependence on their syntactic competence. She also maintains an active research interest in language disorders and consults on a number of grants in that area.

De Villiers, Peter. Professor, Department of Psychology, Smith College. PhD, Psychology, Harvard 1974. Dr. De Villiers studies the acquisition of discourse cohesion devices (particularly anaphoric pronouns, adverbial clauses, and relative clauses) in extended discourse in normal and language disordered children, and their relationship with the development of fluent reading and writing skills. He also studies the acquisition of complex syntax in deaf students' signed and spoken language and its relationship with English literacy development in those students. With Jill de Villiers and two experts on ASL acquisition, he has a four-year NIH-funded project on the relation between language development and theory of mind development in deaf children, particularly the effects of language on children's understanding and ability to reason about other people's cognitive and emotional states.

Frazier, Lyn. Frazier, Lyn. Professor, Department of Linguistics. Ph.D., University of Connecticut (1978). Dr. Frazier's research focuses on the processes involved in parsing of sentences and sentence comprehension. She has been working on the development of a theory of on-line sentence parsing. In collaboration with Drs. C. Clifton and Rayner she has focused on issues related to the nature of processors specialized for language comprehension. This research has dealt specifically with the processing of syntactically ambiguous sentences (garden path sentences) and how people recover from misanalyses as well as underspecification in parsing and, more recently, principles of interpretation. Drs. C. Clifton, Rayner, and Frazier have also been investigating lexical ambiguity and the effects of semantic plausibility on sentence processing. Dr. Frazier is co-P.I. with Dr. Clifton on a grant from NICHHD and co-PI with Dr. Rayner on another grant from NICHHD.

Kingston, John. Associate Professor of Linguistics. Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley (1985). Linguistics. Prof. Kingston is currently investigating how the multiple acoustic correlates that characterize any minimal contrast between speech sounds interact perceptually, in an effort to explain why certain patterns of acoustic covariation recur across languages. Patterns of covariation investigated include but are not limited to those observed in vowels contrasting for height and consonants contrasting for voicing. This work has been extended to an examination of the perception and learning of foreign speech sounds, specifically of Germain vowels by American English listeners. Very recent work in Kingston's laboratory examines the role of lexical and phonotactic constraints on speech perception and thus adds top-down influences to the bottom-up effects that have up to now been the focus of its research. These investigations are supported by a FIRST Award "Integration of articulations in speech," from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health. (1993-1998). This work is also part of long-term collaborations with Prof. Randy Diehl, Psychology Dept., University of Texas at Austin, and Prof. Neil Macmillan, Psychology Dept., Brooklyn College, CUNY (adjunct professor in Psychology at the University of Massachusetts.). Prof. Kingston teaches the graduate introduction to phonetics annually, as well as an advanced graduate seminar on the relationship between phonetics and phonology in alternate years.

Pollatsek, Alexander. Professor. PhD, University of Michigan (1969). Cognitive Area. His primary interests are in reading, most of which is in collaboration with Keith Rayner over a 20 year period, although his research includes other areas including object and scene perception and reasoning in statistics. His substantive interests are primarily in lexical issues, notably the role of phonology and morphology in visual word perception, and he is also engaged in an ongoing project modeling eye movements in reading (a recent article in the Psychological Review is the first step in this project).  His research uses several techniques to converge on visual word identification, including standard laboratory paradigms such as lexical decision and naming, but focuses mainly on investigating lexical processing in reading, using eye fixation data as the dependent variable and using eye-movement contingent-display techniques to investigate the first stages of lexical processing. Recent work has documented the importance of phonological coding early in processing (i.e., even before the reader fixates the information) and that much of these findings generalize to a non-alphabetic orthography (Chinese) and has started (in conjunction with John Kingston) to probe the nature of the phonological code -- whether it is at the level of surface (output) or deep (input) phonology. His research on reading is currently supported by a grant from NIH in collaboration with Keith Rayner (four years, extended by a 10 year MERIT award).

Rayner, Keith. Distinguished University Professor. Ph.D., Cornell (1974). Cognitive Area. His research has focused on two areas: perceptual processes in reading, and on-line language processes. His work on perceptual processes in reading involves a well-known innovative technique in which the text changes contingent upon eye movements. This work has been extended to visual search processes in collaboration with Dr. Fisher of the Department of Industrial Engineering and to scene perception with Dr. Pollatsek. He has investigated issues related to: 1) the size of the perceptual span, 2) control of eye movements in reading, and 3) integration of information across eye movements. The results of his studies demonstrating that the area of useful vision during an eye fixation in reading is rather small and that eye fixation times are a good reflection of on-line cognitive processing during reading quite naturally lead to the second major focus of his work, using eye movements as a tool to study on-line language processes. In collaboration with Dr. Frazier of the Linguistics Department he has investigated syntactic ambiguity and on-line sentence parsing processes. He also has examined how context and anaphora influence processing times for target words in text. A second focus of his research has been the study of lexical ambiguity and its resolution by sentence context (some of this is conjunction with Dr. Duffy). The goal of much of his research on language processing has been to develop a model of on-line language processing during reading. His graduate teaching includes the Division core course and seminars on reading and language processing. Dr. Rayner's research on perceptual processes in reading is supported by a grant from NIH with Dr. Pollatsek as Co-P.I. (4 years, $349,058 total costs; renewed as a 10-year MERIT award), and his research on on-line language processing is supported by a grant with Dr. Frazier. In 1995, he was awarded a Research Scientist Award from NIMH for a five-year period. His applied work includes advising various organizations on issues related to eye movements and other perceptual issues. Rayner is a recognized expert on the topic of eye movements and dyslexia. He has been an invited speaker at a number of international conferences on dyslexia and published a number of papers on the topic, he has done research on different subtypes of dyslexia, and he was the recipient of the first Outstanding Scientist Award made by the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. Dr. Rayner recently completed a six-year term as editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition. In addition, he has been a regular member of several research review panels and journal editorial boards.

Roeper, Thomas. Professor, Linguistics. Thomas Roeper has worked in the area of language acquisition for 25 years. He is the Managing Editor of the journal Language Acquisition together with Ken Wexler and Robert Berwick, and the series Theoretical Studies in Psycholinguistics with Ken Wexler and Lyn Frazier. He has published two edited volumes and a popular book on language acquisition which has been translated into French and Italian. He is on the External Committee for the Max Planck Society, a Partner for the University of Potsdam program in Linguistics, and part of a proposal to study Anti-symmetry from University of Montreal, and a consultant for the Laureate Learning Company in Vermont (Software developers for communication disorders). He has recently become affiliated with the Psychological Corporation in Texas, together with Seymour and J. deVilliers. In addition Professor Roeper has written many articles in linguistic theory on compounds, implicit arguments, middles, nominalizations, and particles. They have appeared primarily in the foremost linguistics journal, Linguistic Inquiry. A primary focus of Roeper's work has been the acquisition of complex syntax. Over the past 10 years, he has focused on question formation in collaboration with J. de Villiers. The work has led to two grants, six dissertations (three in Linguistics, three in Education, Spanish, and Communication Disorders), and at least 50 presentations in 12 countries. The dissertations include one that involves L2 and Chinese, two that involve L2 and Spanish, and one that involves communication disorders and Arabic. In collaboration with scholars in Holland, the Max Planck Gesellschaft, Germany, Switzerland, and Japan, he has explored acquisition of questions in six different languages. In addition, in collaboration with H. Seymour and J. De Villiers, he has explored African American English and acquisition in language-impaired children. His language acquisition work has been supported by grants from NSF, NIH, ZWO (Holland), Max Planck Gesellschaft, DFG (German), and the Swiss research organization, and it has led to five US grants, ten different books, and hundreds of publications and presentations in at least 17 countries. Presentations have included the most prestigious linguistics colloquia (GLOW) as well as psychology meetings, Speech and Hearing Society, and the Association of Black Speech and Hearing Professionals. Work from the NSF grant to de Villiers and Roeper has been featured on a PBS program on language. Roeper, together with J. deVilliers, Seymour, and others, has received support, space, and some equipment funds from the University of Massachusetts to establish a Language Acquisition Center. This center will provide a common resource for cross-disciplinary work between Communication Disorders, Psychology, Linguistics, Spanish and other language departments, and will facilitate the study of both first and second language acquisition.

Selkirk, Elizabeth. Professor , Department of Linguistics,. Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1972). Dr. Selkirk's is currently involved in several different lines of research in phonology. Her principal research and teaching interests at present focus on sentence prosody in all its aspects--phonological, phonetic, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and psycholinguistic. She has recently submitted a grant proposal to the NSF entitled "Prosodic Phrasing in a Model of English Sentence Prosody". One goal of the grant is to train graduate students in the phonetics and phonology of English intonation. Dr.Selkirk is also involved in investigating the relation between phonological structure and morphosyntactic structure both word-internally and on the sentence-level, and has recently been collaborating with Drs. H. Basri, D. Finer and E. Broselow of SUNY Stony Brook on a phonological and syntactic study of prosodic word organization in the Austronesian language Makassarese. Dr. Selkirk is also currently engaged in a collaborative research project with Dr. Louis Goldstein of Yale University and Haskins Laboratories which investigates the articulatory phonetic correlates of syllabification in Berber, a language in which consonants are frequently organized into syllables which lack any vowels.

Seymour, Harry. Professor, Communication Disorders. Ph.D., The Ohio State University (1971). Dr. Seymour is currently engaged in research on the identification of language disorders among children who speak African American English. He is collaborating with Dr. Jill deVilliers of the Psychology Department, Smith College, and Dr. Thomas Roeper of the Linguistics Department in the development of a criterion referenced language instrument for African American Children. Dr. Seymour's research is currently supported by a $460,000 grant from NIDCD. Also, he was until recently Principal Investigator on a 5 year Leadership Training Grant and a Personnel Development Training Grant from the Department of Education. He has just received an NIH contract for $2.7 million with deVilliers as a subcontractor and Roeper as a consultant, to develop language tests for children who speak African-American English. Dr. Seymour has been Chair of the Department of Communication Disorders since 1993 and he is an adjunct professor in the Linguistics Department. He typically teaches the graduate sequence of courses in language disorders in children and a graduate seminar on multicultural issues in communication disorders.

Velleman, Shelley L. Assistant Professor, Communication Disorders Ph.D., University of Texas (1983). Her background spans theoretical phonology and applications of such ideas to applied psycholinguistics (Speech-Language Pathology, English as a Second Language). Her research includes verification and application of current phonological theory (optimality theory, metrical phonology, etc.) to children who are normally developing, autistic, or have developmental verbal dyspraxia or Down syndrome. She investigates the concept of continuity: that one linguistic theory should apply developmentally throughout the lifespan and also to the basic linguistic processes of those with speech and language disorders. Dr. Velleman has served as an editorial consultant for numerous journals and publishers in the field, including American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, Journal of Child Language, Journal of Speech Language and Hearing Research, Applied Psycholinguistics, Child Development, and Lawrence Erlbaum Publishers. In addition, she has reviewed grants for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Foundation, and has served as subcommittee member and also as chair of the Language Disorders V Subcommittee (Phonological and articulatory disorders) of the ASHA Convention Program Committee. She has also served as an ex-officio student member of the Linguistic Society of America Executive Committee and as a member of the Linguistic Society of America Committee on the Status of Women in Linguistics.

Wagner, Laura. Laura Wagner, Ph.D., Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania (1998) Dr. Wagner's research centers on language acquisition and the connections between cognitive and linguistic development. Her dissertation looked at how children learn to map temporal semantic structures onto language speicific morphology. Her recent projects also include an examination of event representations in pre-linguistic infants (in collaboration with Dr. Susan Carey), and an investigation into older children's ability to integrate perspective information, both temporal and otherwise, in a discourse (in collaboration with Dr. Tom Roeper).