Brian Dillon Awarded NSF-BSF Research Grant

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Brian Dillon, associate professor in the linguistics department—along with Aya Meltzer-Asscherof Tel Aviv University and Maayan Keshev, a post-doctoral researcher at UMass Amherst—has been awarded a special research grant jointly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF). Dillon's project, entitled “Bridging encoding and retrieval perspectives on sentence processing errors: Comparing Hebrew and English” investigates how and why memory can distort language comprehension by looking at how memory errors impact speakers of two very different languages, English and Hebrew. 

"Understanding language requires us to use memory," explains Dillon. "We have to remember words as we hear or see them, and put them all together into a single message in memory. As sentences become long, or complex, this becomes difficult, because of the strain on memory. Interestingly, this can lead to misinterpretations or confusion. It's sort of like visual illusions: What you see or hear is one thing, but what you perceive can be another entirely. The goal of this project is to understand how these effects differ across languages. We're comparing English and Hebrew, totally unrelated languages, to see how grammatical differences in these languages change when and where you see these 'illusion' effects. Our goal is to understand how language structure influences how easily language comprehension proceeds in different contexts."

Dillon is excited about collaborating with Meltzer-Asscher, one of the world's leading experts on the psycholinguistics of Hebrew. The project is being led by Keshev, who is currently at UMass Amherst as a post-doctoral researcher, and who involves graduate students here at UMass and at Tel Aviv University. "At a later stage of the project, Keshev will return to Israel to complete the cross-linguistic comparison of English and Hebrew," says Dillon. "We're really excited by the NSF-BSF opportunity that let us develop this exciting collaboration."

NSF-BSF research grants were established in 2012 for the joint funding of collaborative U.S.-Israeli scientific research.

This NSF-BSF grant makes three NSF research grants that Dillon holds. The other two are “Disjoint reference in real-time comprehension: Computational and cross-linguistic perspectives” ($428,254) and “Testing quantitative predictions of sentence processing theories with a large-scale eye-tracking database” ($256,864), a collaborative project with Tal Linzen of NYU. The sum of these three grants is about one million dollars.