Charles Clifton

PhD, 1964, University of Minnesota

AB, 1960, Stanford University

Initiative in Cognitive Science

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.

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

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.

In 2016, I searched UMass catalogs from 1946 and prepared a list of all faculty from then to 2016. Here's a link to an Excel page of the list:

UMass Psychology/PBS faculty, 1945-2016

All my publications

Selected recent publications

           Clifton, C. Jr., Rysling, A., & Bishop, J. (2022). The prosodic accent advantage in phoneme detection: Importance of local context. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 84, 244-259. doi: 10.3758/s13414-021-02371-5 pdf

            Göbel, A., Frazier, L., & Clifton, C. (2021). Tense and Discourse Structure: The Timeline Hypothesis. Discourse Processes, 1-17. doi: 10.1080/0163853x.2021.1924040 pdf

            Frazier, L., & Clifton, C. Jr. (2021). Interpreting adjuncts: Processing English as-clauses. Language and Speech. pdf

            Rysling, A., Bishop, J., Clifton Jr, C., & Yacovone, A. (2020). Preceding syllables are necessary for the accent advantage effect. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America: Express Letter, 148(3), EL285. doi: https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0001780 pdf

            Clifton, C., Jr., & Frazier, L. (2020). Domain restriction of generic statements. Discourse Processes, 57(7), 573-589. Doi: 10.1080/0163853x.2020.1727266 pdf

            Clifton, C., Jr., Xiang, M., & Frazier, L. (2019). A note on the voice mismatch asymmetry in ellipsis. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 48(4), 877-887. DOI 10.1007/s10936-019-09636-z pdf

             Clifton, C., Jr., Dillon, B, & Staub, A. (2019). Lyn Frazier’s contributions to psycholinguistics: An appreciation. In Katy Carlson, Charles Clifton, and Janet Fodor (Eds), Grammatical approaches to language processing: Essays in honor of Lyn Frazier. Pp 1-10. Dordrecht: Springer. pdf

             Clifton, C., Jr., & Frazier, L. (2018). Evaluation of the epistemic state of the speaker/author. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 71(6), 1482-1492 http://dx.doi.org/10/1080/17470218.2017/1338303 pdf

            Frazier, L, Clifton, C. Jr., Rich, S. K., & Duff, J. (2018). Anticipating negation: The do's and don'ts of Neg Raising. Syntax, 21, 160-194. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/synt.12151 pdf

Dillon, B., Frazier, L., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2018). No longer an orphan: Evidence for appositive attachment from sentence processing. Glossa, 3 (1): 32. http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/gjgl.379 pdf

            Frazier, L, & Clifton, C., Jr. (2018). Topic situations: Coherence by inclusion. Journal of Memory and Language, 103, 176-190. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2018.08.006 pdf

            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. doi:10.1353/lan.2017.0003 pdf

            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 pdf

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)

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.