6 November: FYI -- PhD funding (psycholinguistics), UK
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Department: Psychology
Web Address:
http://www.ntu.ac.uk/research/graduate_school/studentships/132584.html
Level: PhD
Duties: Research
Specialty Areas: Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Psycholinguistics
Written Production
Description:
Syntactic Planning in the Production of Multi-Sentence, Spontaneous Text
Application: Candidates prepare a proposal, based on the ideas below,
which must be submitted by 12:00 on 11th December, 2015. The proposal
must be prepared jointly with myself. Therefore potential candidates
should contact me as soon as possible, and well in advance of this
date.
Dates and Funding: Three years, from September 2016. Funding covers
fees and an annual bursary of approximately 14000 GBP.
This project will develop understanding of psycholinguistic processes
underlying production of syntactically-correct written
sentences. Written production proceeds as a series of bursts of
activity, followed by pauses of varying duration as the writer
mentally constructs what to say next. In competent writers production
is remarkably fluent, and pauses between words and between sentences
are typically very short. This temporal pattern results from cognitive
processes that take the writer’s semantic, syntactic and lexical
knowledge and combine this to plan text. The processes are rapid,
cascaded, unconscious, complex, and poorly understood.
Several recent studies have explored planning scope in spoken sentence
production. These suggest that, in experimental contexts in which
subjects produce short, syntactically simple sentences, planning scope
is over sub-sentence units. Written production has largely been
ignored. Writing differs from speech both in that pausing does not
affect communication and because writing additionally requires
spelling retrieval. Our research suggests that, in similar
experimental contexts, writing shows interesting differences
particularly in patterns of pausing mid-sentence, after production
onset.
Experimental studies may not, however, adequately capture
sentence-level planning processes when writers produce spontaneous,
multi-sentence texts – essays, emails, and so forth. Studying written
production in these contexts means that careful experimental control
over what is produced is not possible. This can be replaced, to an
extent, by careful linguistic analysis and then statistical control
when modelling resulting data.
Research associated with this project will take the following general
form: Writers will compose multi-sentence texts (e.g., short essays,
Lego assembly instructions) with accurate timing of each
keystroke. The resulting texts will then be parsed automatically,
using established computational-linguistic methods, to give syntactic
structure. Using methods analogous to those described by Pynte, New, &
Kennedy (2008a, 2008b) it will then be possible to relate syntactic
structure to written time-course. This will test hypotheses similar to
those explored in experimental studies, and additional hypotheses
relating to more complex sentence structures that are difficult to
elicit in an experimental context.
Within these constraints, the PhD candidate will plan their own
programme of research. This could involve comparison between adult and
younger or dyslexic writers (following Torrance, Rønneberg, Johansson,
& Uppstad, submitted), tracking eye movements within the emerging text
using software specifically developed by our research group for this
purpose (Torrance, Johansson, Johansson, & Wengelin, 2015; Wengelin,
Torrance et al., 2009), comparison of handwritten and keyboarded
production, and using Bayesian statistical modelling. Candidate
students will require background in computational linguistics and/or
psycholinguistics with some programming experience and an aptitude for
learning advanced statistical methods. They will join a small group of
active writing researchers with strong international links.
Application Deadline: 11-Dec-2015
Web Address for Applications: http://www.ntu.ac.uk/research/graduate_school/studentships/132584.html
Contact Information:
Dr Mark Torrance
mark.torrance@ntu.ac.uk
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