Edward Gibson is Associate Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. His research interest is language processing, including all factors that make putting words, phrases and sentences together easy or difficult to process, primarily in comprehension, but also in production. Four major research avenues that he has been pursuing in recent years are: (1) word order and sentence complexity / working memory and sentence complexity; (2) syntactic representational issues (e.g., are tree structures appropriate?); (3) discourse coherence representation issues (e.g., are tree structures appropriate?); and (4) the relationship between intonational boundary information and syntactic structure. He and his lab use two primary kinds of methods in order to investigate these issues: (1) behavioral methods like reading and listening paradigms in order to gather reaction time and response accuracy data; and (2) corpus analyses. He received a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science from Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, an M.Phil. in Computer Speech and Language Processing from the University of Cambridge, England, and a Ph.D. in Computational Linguistics from Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh. Following the Ph.D. he was Assistant Professor in the Program in Computational Linguistics in the Department of Philosophy at Carnegie Mellon University from 1992-1993 and Assistant Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT from 1993-1997. Selected papers include: (with N. Pearlmutter) “Constraints on Sentence Comprehension,” in Trends in Cognitive Science; “Linguistic Complexity: Locality of Syntactic Dependencies,” Cognition; (with D. Grodner) “Consequences of the Serial Nature of Linguistic Input,” in Cognitive Science; (with D. Watson) The Relationship between Intonational Phrasing and Syntactic Structure in Language Production,” in Language and Cognitive Processes; and (with F. Wolf) “Representing Discourse Coherence: A Corpus-Based Analysis,” Proceedings of COLING.

Sentence Comprehension | LSA.313
MW 1:00-2:40
Six Week Course