Charles Clifton

My laboratory is located in Adrian Staub's Eyetracking Laboratory in the University of Massachusetts Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Tobin Hall. In collaboration with Lyn Frazier and Brian Dillon, I do some research in the Linguistics Department, Integrative Learning Center. The labs conduct research in how normal adults comprehend and produce sentences and discourses. I study both reading and listening. Over the years, my colleagues and I have been supported by NIH Research Grant HD-18708, "Language Comprehension," by NIH Training Grant HD-07327, "Training in Psycholinguistics," and by NSF BCS 0090674, "Prosody in Language Comprehension." Some of our main current research questions are:

• How does prosody (particularly pitch accents and phonological boundaries) influence auditory language comprehension?
• How do people comprehend elliptical sentences?
• How do readers and listeners decide between bound variable and referential interpretations of pronouns and null anaphors?
• How does the discourse-linked status of a phrase influence its role in language comprehension?
• How does a reader determine the antecedent of a plural pronoun?
• Do readers and listeners compute single or multiple syntactic analyses (is the language processor depth-first or breadth-first)?
• How do readers and listeners interpret scalar adjectives?
• How does the Question Under Discussion guide discourse integration?
• How does the processing of at-issue and not-at-issue content differ?
• Are readers sensitive to the epistemic state of an author?