Charles Clifton | Psychological and Brain Sciences

Professor Emeritus

PhD, 1964, University of Minnesota

AB, 1960, Stanford University

Tobin 435

cec@umass.edu

Laboratory Website:

Clifton - Frazier lab

Research Area(s):

Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience

Center and Institute Affilitation:

Initiative in Cognitive Science

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Research

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?

For some older information, please see my Google Sites page.

Teaching

I no longer do formal teaching, but I greatly enjoy working with undergraduate and graduate students and serving on their thesis committees.

Service

Over the years, I have done my share of service, including chairing the department for two stints. Now that I am emeritus, I am done.

Publications

Selected recent publications (see my CV for a more complete collection)

Clifton, C., Jr., & Staub, A. (2011). Syntactic influences on eye movements during reading. In Simon Liversedge, Iain Gilchrist, and Stefan Everling (Eds), Oxford Handbook on Eye Movements. Chapter 49 (pp 895-909). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mack, J. E., Clifton, C. Jr., Frazier, L., & Taylor, P. V. (2012). (Not) Hearing optional subjects: The effects of pragmatic usage preferences. Journal of Memory and Language, 67(1), 211-223. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2012.02.011 PMCID: PMC3383825

Clifton, C., Jr., & Frazier, L. (2012). Discourse comprehension as guided by the 'Question under Discussion'. Cognitive Psychology, 65, 352-379. PMCID: PMC3394877. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2012.04.001

Clifton, C., Jr., Meyer, A., Wurm, L., & Treiman, R. (2012). Language comprehension and production. In Alice F. Healy & Robert W. Proctor (Eds.), Comprehensive handbook of psychology (Second Edition). Vol. 4: Experimental Psychology). New York: Wiley. Pp 523-547.

Clifton, C., Jr. (2013). Situational context affects definiteness preferences: Accommodation of presuppositions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition,, 39, 487-501 doi: 10.1037/a0028975 PMCID: PMC3893092

Breen, M., & Clifton, C. Jr. (2013). Stress matters revisited: A boundary change experiment. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 66, 1896-1909. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2013.766899 PMCID: PMC3661722

Frazier, L, Clifton, C., Jr., Carlson, K., & Harris, J. (2014). Standing alone with prosodic help. Language and Cognitive Processes, 29, 459-469. doi 10.1080/01690965.2013.828095. PMC 3979625

Benatar, A., & Clifton, C. Jr. (2014). Newness, givenness and discourse updating: Evidence from eye movements. Journal of Memory and Language, 71, 1-16. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2013.10.003 PMC 3873159

Dillon, B., Clifton, C. Jr., & Frazier, L. (2014). Pushed aside: Parentheticals, memory and processing. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 29, 483-498. doi: 10.1080/01690965.2013.866684. PMC 4010231

Frazier, L., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2015). Without his shirt off he saved the child from almost drowning: Interpreting an uncertain input. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 30(6), 635-647. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2014.995109

Clifton, C., Jr. (2015). The role of phonology in reading: A selective review. In L. Frazier & E. Gibson (Eds.), Explicit and implicit prosody in sentence processing (pp 161-176). New York: Springer.

Hemforth, B., Fernandez, S., Clifton, C. Jr., Konieczny, L, & Walter, M. (2015). Relative clause attachment in German, English, Spanish, and French: Effects of position and length. Lingua, 166, 43-64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.08.010

Clifton, C., Jr, Ferreira, F., Henderson, J. M., Inhoff, A. W., Liversedge, S., Reichle, E.D., & Schotter, E. R. (2016). Eye movements in reading and information processing: Keith Rayner's 40 year legacy. Journal of Memory and Language, 86, 1-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.07.004

Clifton Jr, C., & Frazier, L. (2016). Accommodation to an unlikely episodic state. Journal of Memory and Language, 86, 20-34. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2015.10.004

Clifton, C., Jr., & Frazier, L. (2016). Focus in Corrective Exchanges: Effects of Pitch Accent and Syntactic Form. Language and Speech, 59,544-561 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0023830915623578

Dillon, B., Staub, A., Levy, J., & Clifton, C. Jr. (2017). Which noun phrases is the verb supposed to agree with? Object agreement in American English. Language, 93, 65-96.

Staub, A., Dillon, B., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2017). The matrix verb as a source of comprehension difficulty in object relative sentences. Cognitive Science. doi: 10.1111/cogs.12448

Dillon, B, Clifton, C.,Jr, , Sloggett, S., & Frazier, L. (2017). Appositives and their aftermath: Interference depends on at-issue vs. not-at-issue status. Journal of Memory and Language, 96, 93-109

Clifton, C., Jr., & Frazier, L. (2017). Evaluation of the epistemic state of the speaker/author. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. Published online June 5 2017 http://dx.doi.org/10/1080/17470218.2017/1338303

Clifton, C., Jr., & Frazier, L. (2018). Context effects in discourse: The QUD. Discourse Processes. Published online June 26 2017 . https://doi.org/10.1080/016385X.2017.1330029

Frazier, L, Dillon, B., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2017). Together they stand: Interpreting not at issue content. Language and Speech. Published online June 27 2017 https://doi.org/10.1177/0023830917714608

Dillon, B., Frazier, L., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2018). No longer an orphan: Evidence for appositive attachment from sentence processing. Glossa, 3, 32. http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.379

Frazier, L, Clifton, C. Jr., Rich, S. K., & Duff, J. (2018). Anticipating negation: The do's and don'ts of Neg Raising. Syntax. Published online Feb 13,2018. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/synt.12151

Curriculum Vitae

cliftonc.pdf

Collaborators

Lyn Frazier, Linguistics (https://people.umass.edu/lyn/)

Adrian Staub, Psychology (http://blogs.umass.edu/astaub/about/)

Brian Dillon, Linguistics (https://www.umass.edu/linguistics/member/brian-dillon)

Biography

I entered graduate school at the University of Minnesota to study social psychology with Stan Schachter, but I fell under the sway of the cognitive revolution at the start of the 1960s and wound up studying psycholinguistics with Jim Jenkins, a marvelous mentor. After trying for four years to do research on child language at the University of Iowa, I joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts, where I have spent my whole career (apart from highly-valued years spent at Stanford University, the University of Sussex, the Applied Psychology Unit at Cambridge, England, and the University of Edinburgh). Overlooking a few years when I studied memory scanning processes, my research career has focused sharply on questions of psycholinguistics, especially how sentences and discourses are understood. I have enjoyed a long-term collaboration with Lyn Frazier of the UMass Linguistics Department. NIH supported our research for 30 years, and we have been able to learn quite a lot about syntactic, semantic, prosodic, and pragmatic processes in language comprehension. I have also enjoyed collaborations with wonderful colleagues in the psychology department, perhaps most notably Keith Rayner, from whom I learned about eye tracking, and recently Adrian Staub, who is carrying on the tradition of excellent psycholinguistic research at UMass. Over the years, I have handled some of the chores of the psychology department (now Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences), including serving two periods as Acting Chair and Chair. Now that I am retired, I do just what I want to do: run and analyze experiments and write them up, together with some editorial and reviewing duties.

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