Updated on 2022/06/30

写真a

 
ROLAND, Douglas William
 
Affiliation
Faculty of Science and Engineering, Global Center for Science and Engineering
Job title
Associate Professor(without tenure)
Profile
My area of specialization is computational psycholinguistics. I use a combination of psycholinguistic experiments and computational models to investigate how the human mind produces and comprehends language. I am interested in cognitive factors such as the sources of difficulty during language comprehension and the nature of the mental representations used by comprehenders, as well as methodological factors, such as how different experimental methodologies (e.g., data from eye movement studies vs. data from the self-paced reading paradigm) influence the resulting data. I am also interested in how the differences between the ways in which language is used in typical laboratory experiments and in naturally occurring contexts affect investigators’ results. In order to carry out this research, I use a variety of tools including psycholinguistic experimentation, eye movement data, computational modeling, and corpus analysis.

Concurrent Post

  • Faculty of International Research and Education   Graduate School of International Culture and Communication Studies

Research Institute

  • 2020
    -
    2022

    理工学術院総合研究所   兼任研究員

Education

  • 　
    -
    2001

    University of Colorado   Department of Linguistics   Ph.D.  

  • 　
    -
    1994

    University of Colorado   Department of Linguistics   MA  

  • 　
    -
    1989

    University of Delaware   Department of Chemistry   B.S.  

Degree

  • University of Colorado   Ph.D.

Research Experience

  • 2018
    -
    Now

    Waseda University   Faculty of Science and Engineering   Associate Professor

  • 2014
    -
    2018

    The University of Tokyo   Center for Global Communication Strategies   Project Assistant Professor

  • 2013
    -
    2014

    The University of Tokyo   Graduate School of Arts and Sciences   Visiting Researcher

  • 2005
    -
    2013

    University at Buffalo, The State University of New York   Department of Linguistics   Assistant Professor

 

Research Areas

  • Experimental psychology

  • Linguistics

Research Interests

  • Linguistics

  • Cognitive Science

  • Psycholinguistics

Papers

  • The processing of pronominal relative clauses: Evidence from eye movements

    Douglas Roland, Gail Mauner, Yuki Hirose

    Journal of Memory and Language   119  2021.08  [Refereed]

    　View Summary

    Relative clauses have played a key role in distinguishing between different theories of language comprehension. A reversal in processing costs between full NP and pronominal relative clauses reported by Reali and Christiansen (2007) has been used to argue for expectation-based theories of comprehension (e.g., Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), and against memory-based theories of comprehension (e.g., Gibson, 1998, 2000; Gordon, Hendrick, & Johnson, 2001; Lewis, Vasishth, & Van Dyke, 2006). We present results relying on eye-movements during reading, in conjunction with modeling of differences between self-paced reading and eye movement data, to argue that the results observed by Reali and Christiansen and others are due to the self-paced reading paradigm, and do not reflect an actual reversal in processing costs. Overall, our results suggest that a combination of memory-based factors and spillover explains the pattern of reading times observed in various relative clause experiments such as those in Reali and Christiansen (2007), and that while comprehenders’ expectations undeniably play a role in language comprehension, the role may be less dramatic than is suggested by previous studies.

    DOI

  • Semantic similarity to high-frequency verbs affects syntactic frame selection

    Eunkyung Yi, Jean Pierre Koenig, Douglas Roland

    Cognitive Linguistics   30 ( 3 ) 601 - 628  2019.08  [Refereed]

    　View Summary

    This paper investigates the effect of the high frequency of occurrence of a verb in a syntactic frame on speakers' selection of that syntactic frame for other verbs. We hypothesize that the frequent co-occurrence of a syntactic frame and a particular verb (what we call an anchor verb) leads to a strong association between the verb and the frame analogous to the relationship between a category and its best exemplar. Our Verb Anchor Hypothesis claims that verbs that are more semantically similar to the anchor are more likely to occur in that syntactic frame than verbs that are less semantically similar to the anchor. We tested the Verb Anchor Hypothesis on the dative alternation which involves the meaning-preserving ditransitive and prepositional frames. A corpus study determined that give was the anchor verb for the ditransitive frame. We then examined whether high semantic similarity to give increases the likelihood of an alternating verb (e.g. to hand) occurring in the ditransitive frame (Mary handed the boy a book) rather than in the prepositional frame (Mary handed a book to the boy). The results of several logistic regression analyses show that semantic similarity to give makes a unique contribution to predicting the choice of the ditransitive frame aside from other factors known to affect syntactic frame selection. Additional analyses suggest that the Verb Anchor Hypothesis might also hold for more narrowly-defined subclasses of alternating verbs.

    DOI

  • Relative Clause Processing by L2 speakers of English

    Douglas Roland

    IEICE Technical Report TL2019-24   119 ( 151 ) 67 - 68  2019.07

  • Developing the materials of a reading span test for English learners involving pronoun resolution

    Shiori Asami, Douglas Roland, Yasunori Morishima

    Educational Studies   61   81 - 90  2019  [Refereed]

  • Eye movement data and the causes of relative clause difficulty

    Roland, Douglas, Yuki Hirose, Gail Mauner

    IEICE Technical Report TL2018-17   118 ( 63 ) 27 - 31  2018.07

  • Statistical analysis of eye-movement data and reading time data in language comprehension research

    Manabu Arai, Douglas Roland

    Proceedings of the Institute of Statistical Mathematics   64 ( 2 ) 201 - 231  2016.12  [Refereed]

    CiNii

  • Which event properties matter for which cognitive task?

    Jean Pierre Koenig, Douglas Roland, Hongoak Yun, Gail Mauner

    Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing     213 - 234  2015.01  [Refereed]

    　View Summary

    Two important questions in the language sciences have been: What portion of event information is accessed and used during sentence processing? What portion of event information is relevant to the grammar of natural languages? An extensive amount of linguistic and psycholinguistic research over the past couple of decades has shown that quite a bit of event information is relevant to online sentence processing, but only a limited amount of information is relevant to the grammars of natural languages. One possible cause for this divergence is that grammar development and language comprehension are carried out by separate systems that are sensitive to different types of information. Another possible explanation is that grammar development and language comprehension are carried out by an integrated system, but the task demands of language learning and the task demands of language comprehension are different. In this chapter, we show that, grammatical systems that seem more “exotic” from the point of view of more well–known languages still make use of a limited set of properties and that these “exotic” languages still obey the same design constraints as more well–known systems; we then briefly report on some computational models of online reading experiments, which demonstrate quite clearly that a distinct and much larger kind of event knowledge is used by the human parser. We propose an explanation for this difference in the use of event knowledge: Grammars and parsers use different kinds of event knowledge because the tasks listeners and grammar learners must perform are quite distinct.

    DOI

  • Corpus frequency of relative clause association in Japanese.

    Yamada, Toshiyuki, Douglas Roland, Manabu Arai, Yuki Hirose

    IEICE Technical Report TL2014-35   114 ( 176 ) 127 - 132  2014.08  [Refereed]

  • Eye movements during the processing of pronominal relative clauses by native and non-native speakers of English.

    Roland, Douglas, Yuki Hirose, Gail Mauner, Stephanie Foraker

    IEICE Technical Report TL2018-17   114 ( 176 ) 19 - 24  2014.08

  • The processing of it object relative clauses: Evidence against a fine-grained frequency account

    Paul M. Heider, Jeruen E. Dery, Douglas Roland

    Journal of Memory and Language   75   58 - 76  2014.08  [Refereed]

    　View Summary

    Reali and Christiansen (2007a) found that pronominal object relative clauses were easier to process than analogous subject relative clauses, except when the pronoun is it. They attributed this to it occurring more frequently in subject relatives than in object relatives, while the opposite was true for the other pronouns. We find that their it relative clause processing result was due to a garden path like effect caused by participants misinterpreting the referent of the grammatical subject of the sentence containing the relative clause, rather than any inherent properties of the relative clause itself. We also find that when reduced object relative clauses are taken into account, it occurs more frequently in object relative clauses than subject relative clauses. Our results are broadly consistent with expectation-based accounts of processing, but not with a fine-grained account that would predict different behavior for reduced and unreduced object relative clauses. © 2014 Elsevier Inc.

    DOI

  • Discourse expectations and relative clause processing

    Douglas Roland, Gail Mauner, Carolyn O'Meara, Hongoak Yun

    Journal of Memory and Language   66 ( 3 ) 479 - 508  2012.04  [Refereed]

    　View Summary

    We investigated the role of discourse context in relative clause processing. We first replicated Reali and Christiansen's (2007a) finding that pronominal object relative clauses are easier to process than analogous subject relative clauses (an effect which stands in contrast to previous research on pronominal relative clauses). We then analyzed corpus data to demonstrate that the embedded noun phrase in object relative clauses nearly always has a discourse-old referent, even if the noun phrase is not pronominal, while the referent of the embedded noun phrase in subject relative clauses is typically discourse-new. We then extended the work of Mak et al. (2008), by demonstrating in region-by-region reading that full noun phrase object relative clauses are not more difficult to process than subject relatives when they are preceded by appropriate discourse contexts. Finally, we reanalyzed data from the Dundee Eye-tracking corpus to show that contra Demberg and Keller (2007), naturally occurring object relatives are no harder to process than subject relatives. We conclude that the processing difficulties associated with object as compared to subject relative clauses arises because object relative clauses violate more discourse expectations in typical experimental contexts. © 2011 Elsevier Inc..

    DOI

  • Semantic similarity, predictability, and models of sentence processing

    Douglas Roland, Hongoak Yun, Jean Pierre Koenig, Gail Mauner

    Cognition   122 ( 3 ) 267 - 279  2012.03  [Refereed]

    　View Summary

    The effects of word predictability and shared semantic similarity between a target word and other words that could have taken its place in a sentence on language comprehension are investigated using data from a reading time study, a sentence completion study, and linear mixed-effects regression modeling. We find that processing is facilitated if the different possible words that could occur in a given context are semantically similar to each other, meaning that processing is affected not only by the nature of the words that do occur, but also the relationships between the words that do occur and those that could have occurred. We discuss possible causes of the semantic similarity effect and point to possible limitations of using probability as a model of cognitive effort. © 2011 Elsevier B.V.

    DOI PubMed

  • The Effect of Semantic Similarity is a Function of Contextual Constraint

    Yun, Hongoak, Gail Mauner, Douglas Roland, Jean-Pierre Koenig

    Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society     1191 - 1196  2012  [Refereed]

  • Discourse and relative clauses: Building a more complete model of expectations in language processing

    Douglas Roland

    IEICE Technical Report TL2009-23   109 ( 140 ) 85 - 90  2009.07  [Invited]

  • Frequency of basic English grammatical structures: A corpus analysis

    Douglas Roland, Frederic Dick, Jeffrey L. Elman

    Journal of Memory and Language   57 ( 3 ) 348 - 379  2007.10  [Refereed]

    　View Summary

    Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been given to the appropriateness of using any particular set of corpus frequencies in modeling human language. We provide a comprehensive set of structural frequencies for a variety of written and spoken corpora, focusing on structures that have played a critical role in debates on normal psycholinguistics, aphasia, and child language acquisition, and compare our results with those from several recent papers to illustrate the implications and limitations of using corpus data in psycholinguistic research. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

    DOI

  • Why is that? Structural prediction and ambiguity resolution in a very large corpus of English sentences

    Douglas Roland, Jeffrey L. Elman, Victor S. Ferreira

    Cognition   98 ( 3 ) 245 - 272  2006.01  [Refereed]

    　View Summary

    Previous psycholinguistic research has shown that a variety of contextual factors can influence the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous structures, but psycholinguistic experimentation inherently does not allow for the investigation of the role that these factors play in natural (uncontrolled) language use. We use regression modeling in conjunction with data from the British National Corpus to measure the amount and specificity of the information available for disambiguation in natural language use. We examine the Direct Object/Sentential Complement ambiguity and the closely related issue of complementizer use in sentential complements, and find that both ambiguity resolution and complementizer use can be predicted from contextual information. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

    DOI PubMed

  • Verb subcategorization frequencies: American English corpus data, methodological studies, and cross-corpus comparisons

    Susanne Gahl, Dan Jurafsky, Douglas Roland

    Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, and Computers   36 ( 3 ) 432 - 443  2004.08  [Refereed]

    　View Summary

    Verb subcategorization frequencies (verb biases) have been widely studied in psycholinguistics and play an important role in human sentence processing. Yet available resources on subcategorization frequencies suffer from limited coverage, limited ecological validity, and divergent coding criteria. Prior estimates of verb transitivity, for example, vary widely with corpus size, coverage, and coding criteria. This article provides norming data for 281 verbs of interest to psycholinguistic research, sampled from a corpus of American English, along with a detailed coding manual. We examine the effect on transitivity bias of various coding decisions and methods of computing verb biases.

    DOI

  • Modeling ambiguity resolution

    Roland, Douglas, Douglas, Jeffrey L. Elman, Victor S. Ferreira

    IEICE Technical Report TL2004-10   104 ( 170 ) 55 - 64  2004.07

  • Verb subcategorization frequency differences between business-news and balanced corpora: the role of verb sense.

    Roland, Douglas, Daniel Jurafsky, Lise Menn, Susanne Gahl, Elizabeth Elder, Chris Riddoch

    Proceedings of the Workshop on Comparing Corpora, held in conjunction with the 38th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics     28 - 34  2000  [Refereed]

    DOI

  • How verb subcategorization frequencies are affected by corpus choice

    Roland, Douglas, Daniel Jurafsky

    Proceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and 17th International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING-ACL 1998)     1117 - 1121  1998  [Refereed]

    DOI

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Books and Other Publications

  • Which event properties matter for which cognitive task? In Roberto G. de Almeida and Christina Manouilidou (Eds.), Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing

    Koenig, Jean-Pierre, Douglas Roland, Hongoak Yun, Gail Mauner( Part： Joint author, Pages 213-234)

    Springer  2015 ISBN: 9783319101125

  • Computational and Corpus Models of Human Sentence Comprehension. In Michael J. Spivey, Ken McRae, and Marc F. Joanisse, (Eds.), The Cambridge Handbook of Psycholinguistics

    Roland, Douglas, Mary Hare( Part： Joint author, Pages 390-405)

    Cambridge University Press  2012 ISBN: 9781139029377

  • Verb sense and verb subcategorization probabilities. In Paola Merlo and Suzanne Stevenson (Eds), The Lexical Basis of Sentence Processing: Formal, Computational, and Experimental Issues,

    Roland, Douglas, Daniel Jurafsky( Part： Joint author, Pages 325-345)

    John Benjamins  2002 ISBN: 9781588111562

Misc

  • A psycholinguistic approach to the cognitive mechanisms underlying second language comprehension

    Sayaka Sato, Douglas Roland

    INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY   51   811 - 811  2016.07

    Research paper, summary (international conference)  

Presentations

  • English abstract writing workshop

    Douglas Roland  [Invited]

    The Linguistic Society of Japan 

    Presentation date： 2020.12

  • The processing of pronominal relative clauses: Evidence from eye movements

    Douglas Roland, Gail Mauner, Yuki Hirose[International coauthorship]

    33rd Annual CUNY Human Sentence Processing Conference  (University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Massachusetts) 

    Presentation date： 2020.03

    Event date：
    2020.03
    　
    　

  • Relative Clause Processing by L2 speakers of English

    ローランド ダグラス ウィリアム

    25th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), 

    Presentation date： 2019.09

  • Relative Clause Processing by L2 speakers of English

    ローランド ダグラス ウィリアム

    Mental Architecture of Processing and Learning of Language 2019 (MAPLL-TCP-TL 2019) 

    Presentation date： 2019.07

  • Syntax: Computational models of sentence-level language comprehension.

    Douglas Roland

    “Computational psycholinguistics: Overview and prospects” workshop at the 158th meeting of the Linguistics Society of Japan 

    Presentation date： 2019.06

  • Development of a reading span test for English learners using pronoun resolution

    Asami, Shiori, Douglas Roland, Yasunori Morishima

    The 16th annual meeting of the Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology 

    Presentation date： 2018.09

  • Eye movement data and the causes of relative clause difficulty

    Roland, Douglas, Yuki Hirose, Gail Mauner

    Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP 2018) 

    Presentation date： 2018.09

  • Eye movement data and the causes of relative clause difficulty

    Roland, Douglas, Yuki Hirose, Gail Mauner

    Mental Architecture of Processing and Learning of Language (MAPLL 2018) 

    Presentation date： 2018.07

  • L1 and L2 comprehension of English relative clauses

    Douglas Roland  [Invited]

    Discourse Psychology Research Group (at Hosei University) 

    Presentation date： 2017.08

  • Second language learners' (un)predictive processing: Evidence from eye-tracking reading experiments

    Minemi, Itsuki, Saki Tsumura, Douglas Roland, Manabu Arai, Yuki Hirose

    The Japanese Society for Language Sciences 19th Annual International Conference (JSLS2017) 

    Presentation date： 2017.07

  • L1 and L2 comprehension of English relative clauses

    Roland, Douglas

    The 89th ELSJ Annual General Meeting 

    Presentation date： 2017.05

  • L2 Garden-Path Eye Movement Patterns: Proficiency and Native Language

    Tsumura, Saki, Itsuki Minemi, Douglas Roland, Manabu Arai, Yuki Hirose

    The 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2017.03

  • L2 structural prediction depends on the nature of learners' exposure to the target language

    Minemi, Itsuki, Saki Tsumura, Douglas Roland, Manabu Arai, Yuki Hirose

    The 30th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2017.03

  • L1 and L2 comprehension of English relative clauses

    Douglas Roland

    The State of the Art in Relative Clause Processing – Recent Findings from L1, L2, and Cross-Linguistic Data, at The Japanese Society for Language Sciences 18th Annual International Conference (JSLS2016) 

    Presentation date： 2016.06

  • What role does discourse play in relative clause processing?

    Douglas Roland  [Invited]

    Discourse Psychology Research Group (at Hosei University) 

    Presentation date： 2016.03

  • Neural basis for goal-oriented conversation.

    Hirotani, Masako, Koike, Takahiko, Okazaki, Shuntaro, Sumiya, Motofumi, Hashiguchi, Maho, Ito, Yoshikuni, Roland, Douglas, Sadato, Norihiro

    The 29th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2016.03

  • Reversal in reading times for pronominal relative clauses: Difference in expectations or spillover?

    Roland, Douglas, Yuki Hirose, Gail Mauner, Stephani Foraker

    The 21st Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 

    Presentation date： 2015.09

  • Eye movement data for L1 and L2 speakers of English reflects processing difficulties in different ways

    Roland, Douglas, Yuki Hirose

    The 21st Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 

    Presentation date： 2015.09

  • Expectations and pronominal relative clauses: Eye movement data vs. self-paced reading

    Roland, Douglas, Yuki Hirose, Gail Mauner, Stephani Foraker

    28th Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2015.03

  • Can Word Order be Overridden by Conceptual Level Factors: Evidence From Structural Priming Effects in Japanese Sentence Production

    Deng, Ying, Douglas Roland, Yuki Hirose

    The 20th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 

    Presentation date： 2014.09

  • Certain people donﾕt need modification: The effect of indefiniteness on Japanese relative clause association preferences

    Bai, Chunhua, Douglas Roland, Yuki Hirose

    The 20th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 

    Presentation date： 2014.09

  • Eye movements during the processing of pronominal relative clauses

    Roland, Douglas, Yuki Hirose, Gail Mauner, Stephani Foraker

    The 20th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 

    Presentation date： 2014.09

  • Corpus frequency of relative clause association in Japanese

    Yamada, Toshiyuki, Douglas Roland, Manabu Arai, Yuki Hirose

    Mental Architecture of Processing and Learning of Language (MAPLL) 2014 

    Presentation date： 2014.08

  • Eye movements during the processing of pronominal relative clauses by native and non-native speakers of English

    Roland, Douglas, Yuki Hirose, Gail Mauner, Stephanie Foraker

    Mental Architecture of Processing and Learning of Language (MAPLL) 2014 

    Presentation date： 2014.08

  • Can word order be overridden by conceptual factors: evidence from structural priming effects in Japanese sentence production

    Ying, Deng, Douglas Roland, Yuki Hirose

    The International Workshop on Language Production 

    Presentation date： 2014.07

  • Analyzing Reading Time Data with Linear Mixed Effects Regression Models.

    Douglas Roland

    Invited presentation at The University of Tokyo 

    Presentation date： 2014.02

  • Early participant role commitments have their greatest impact on the integration of unpredictable role fillers

    Yun, Hongoak, Gail Mauner, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Douglas Roland

    The 25th Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2012

  • The Effect of Semantic Similarity is a Function of Contextual Constraint

    Yun, Hongoak, Gail Mauner, Douglas Roland, Jean-Pierre Koenig

    The 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society 

    Presentation date： 2012

  • Semantic attractors and constructional frequency in the English ditransitive construction

    Yi, Eunkyung, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Douglas Roland

    The 2011 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. 

    Presentation date： 2011

  • It object relatives are also easier: Evidence against a fine-grained frequency account

    Heider, Paul, Jeruen Dery, Douglas Roland

    The 2011 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America 

    Presentation date： 2011

  • Influence of Instrument Roles and Role Fillers on Reading Times

    Yun, Hongoak, Gail Mauner, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Douglas Roland

    The 51th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society 

    Presentation date： 2010.11

  • Discourse and relative clauses: building a more complete model of expectations in language processing

    Roland, Douglas

    Mental Architecture of Processing and Learning of Language (MAPLL) 2009 

    Presentation date： 2009.07

  • The problem with Mixed-Effect Models

    Roland, Douglas. Relative, clauses remodeled

    22nd Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2009.03

  • Which verb semantics for which cognitive task

    Jean-Pierre Koenig, Doug Roland, Hongoak Yun, Gail Mauner

    Verb Concepts: Cognitive Science perspectives on verbal representation and processing 

    Presentation date： 2008.10

  • Relative clauses and surprisal

    Roland, Douglas

    14th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 

    Presentation date： 2008.09

  • The effects of semantic predictability and shared similarity with the other possible fillers on processing

    Yun, Hongoak, Douglas Roland, Jean-Pierre Koenig, Gail Mauner

    21st Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2008.03

  • Discourse and object relative clauses: the effect of topic versus mention

    Roland, Douglas, Carolyn O'Meara, Hongoak Yun, Gail Mauner

    21st Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2008.03

  • Discourse context and English object relative clauses

    Roland, Douglas, Carolyn O'Meara, Hongoak Yun, Gail Mauner

    The International Conference on Processing Head-final Structures 

    Presentation date： 2007.09

  • Processing object relative clauses: Discourse or frequency?

    Roland, Douglas, Carolyn O'Meara, Hongoak Yun, Gail Mauner

    20th Annual Meeting of the CUNY 2007 Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2007.03

  • Class on UNIX for linguists/using corpora

    Douglas Roland  [Invited]

    LSA Summer Institute (at Stanford University) 

    Presentation date： 2007

  • Modeling ambiguity resolution

    Roland, Douglas, Jeffrey L. Elman, Victor S. Ferreira

    The Thought and Language Symposium 

    Presentation date： 2004.07

  • Using corpus data to model ambiguity resolution and complementizer use

    Roland, Douglas

    The 78th Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America 

    Presentation date： 2004.01

  • Why 'that'?

    Roland, Douglas, Jeffrey L. Elman, Victor S. Ferreira

    The 9th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 

    Presentation date： 2003.08

  • Implementing the resolution of the temporary DO/SC ambiguity

    McRae, Ken, Mary Hare, Jeffrey L. Elman, Douglas Roland

    16th Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2003.03

  • Signposts along the garden path

    Roland, Douglas, Jeffrey L. Elman, Victor S. Ferreira

    The 16th Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2003.03

  • A new resource and methodological considerations on verb subcategorization biases

    Gahl, Susanne, Douglas Roland, Daniel Jurafsky

    15th Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2002.03

  • Predicting verb subcategorization from the semantic context preceding the verb

    Roland, Douglas

    The 15th Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 2002.03

  • Verb Behavior is not Verb Nature: Sense and Genre Bias as Sources of Subcategorization Probabilities

    Roland, Douglas, Daniel Jurafsky, Laura Michaelis

    12th Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 1999.03

  • How verb subcategorization frequencies are affected by the way you measure them

    Roland, Douglas, Daniel Jurafsky

    11th Annual meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 1998.03

  • Computing verbal valence frequencies: corpora versus norming studies

    Roland, Douglas, Daniel Jurafsky

    10th Annual Meeting of the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing 

    Presentation date： 1997.03

  • Verb access difficulties and pragmatics in agrammatic aphasic narratives

    Bencini, Giulia, Douglas Roland

    The annual meeting of the Linguistics Society of America 

    Presentation date： 1996

  • Verb 'weight' in agrammatism: English, Japanese, French, and Italian

    Roland, Douglas, Giulia Bencini

    New Methods in Comparative Aphasiology 

    Presentation date： 1995.06

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Specific Research

  • Investigating the relationship between initial fixation duration while reading and language comprehension difficulties in non-native speakers of English

    2021  

    　View Summary

    The goal of this project was to examine how various factors such as word frequency, structural complexity, and predictability affect the eye movements of non-native speakers of English during reading. Unfortunately, COVID-19 related restrictions have prevented the collection of eye movement data (the setup of the experimental equipment requires the participants and experimenter to be in a small enclosed space). As an alternative, we investigated theoretically related issues looking at how structural complexity and predictability influence the reading times of native speakers of English, by replicating findings from Staub, Foppolo, Donati, and Cacchetto (2018) using an on-line reading task as well as by collecting sentence completion data from native speakers of English. These results will be used to construct a new experiment testing an alternative explanation for the results in Staub et al. (2018). This will allow us to better understand the factors affecting language comprehension of native speakers, and serve as an additional baseline for the research described in the original version of this proposal. 

  • Eye movements during reading as a window to non-native speaker's language comprehension processes

    2020  

    　View Summary

    The goals of this project were to investigate the pattern of eye-movements of second language learners of English (i.e., Japanese speakers of English) while reading sentences containing relative clauses in order to investigate how non-native speakers process these structures. We collected data from 154 participants across three experiments. We found that while non-native speakers showed signs of difficulty in the same regions of the sentences that native speakers did, the difficulties were reflected differently in the patterns of eye movements. Specifically, while native speakers show evidence of processing difficulty in their initial fixations on a word, non-native speakers’ difficulties are reflected only in evidence of rereading. This suggests that non-native speakers are not processing language as immediately as native speakers. Unfortunately, we had to stop collecting eye movement data due to COVID19 safety precautions. However, we were able to collect additional reading time data from 120 native speakers of English using an on-line self-paced reading time task. This data will serve as a baseline point of comparison for future work on L2 speakers. 

  • Eye movements during reading as a window to non-native speaker's language comprehension processes

    2019   Saki Tsumura, Shiori Asami

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    The goals of this project were to investigate the pattern of eye-movements of second language learners of English (i.e., Japanese speakers of English) while reading sentences containing relative clauses in order to investigate how non-native speakers process these structures. We collected data from 154 participants across three experiments. We found that while non-native speakers showed signs of difficulty in the same regions of the sentences that native speakers did, the difficulties were reflected differently in the patterns of eye movements. Specifically, while native speakers show evidence of processing difficulty in their initial fixations on a word, non-native speakers’ difficulties are reflected only in evidence of rereading. This suggests that non-native speakers are not processing language as immediately as native speakers.

  • Are differences between native and non-native speakers' eye movements during reading due to differences in representation,processing,knowledge,or strategy?

    2018  

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    The goals of this project were to investigate the pattern of eye-movements of second language learners of English (i.e., Japanese speakers of English) while reading sentences containing relative clauses in order to investigate how non-native speakers process these structures. We conducted two experiments, collecting data from approximately 40 participants for each experiment. We found that non-native speakers reread the target sentences more than native speakers do, resulting in non-native speakers making approximately twice as many fixations per sentence as native speakers did. We also found that like native speakers, non-native speakers also faced the greatest degree of processing difficulty when reading full NP object relative clauses (as opposed to pronominal relative clauses or subject relative clauses). Because the longer reading times of non-native speakers result in a higher data loss due to blinks occurring while reading, we will need to collect data from additional participants to have the same degree of statistical power as in the data from native speakers which we are using as a point of comparison.

 

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