Research Interests: Spoken Language Production and Comprehension
My research interests involve both spoken language production and comprehension in adults. In the case of production, much of my work has investigated the processes underlying the establishment of subject-verb and subject-pronoun number agreement, which is a quintessential way in which languages solve the problem of encoding simultaneous conceptual or perceptual relations in an ordered string of words. For example, in the sentence, The blanket on the babies is blue, the singular number agreement between the noun blanket and the verb is encodes a simultaneous perceptual relation between an object and its color. The example also demonstrates that the agreement is established with respect to an abstract grammatical relation between two constituents of a sentence, as opposed to a simple contiguous relation between two words.
My research in language production also has examined the effects of asymmetries in the markedness (componential complexity) of words on their encoding (e.g., Ashenfelter and Eberhard, 2007; Eberhard, 1997). For example, Ashenfelter and Eberhard showed that verbs that contrast with respect to the addition of a morpheme (e.g., tie vs. untie) differentially compete for selection during encoding as evidenced by an asymmetry in anticipatory and perseveratory errors involving them. In particular, an intended utterance, such as he tied the knot and untied the bow was more likely to be erroneously produced as he untied the knot and untied the bow than as he tied the knot and tied the bow. The same asymmetry was found with verbs that contrasted only with respect to their semantic markedness (e.g., enable vs. disable) These findings are counterintuitive because the simpler, unmarked verb has a higher frequency of occurrence than the marked counterpart, and, typically, frequency increases the availability or competitiveness of lexical representations. Thus, the results of our study have implications for decompositional theories of lexical semantics as well as computational models of language production and recent work in aphasia.
My work in comprehending spoken sentences began at the University of Rochester where I and several collaborators (M. Tanenhaus, M. Spivey, and J. Sedivy) developed the visual worlds paradigm, which provides a continuous on-line measure of listeners' interpretation of spoken sentences. The paradigm involves video-recording listeners' eye movements as they follow spoken instructions for manipulating visual objects, such as Put the 5 of hearts that is below the eight of clubs above the 3 of diamonds. (Click on the left picture below to view a quicktime movie of a listener's fixations played at normal speed, and click on the right picture to view the movie in slow motion.) I and my collaborators have used this methodology to explore questions about the integration of linguistic and contextual information that supports listeners' rapid incremental interpretation of words in spoken sentences.
More recently, I have begun to explore the coordination of speech, gesture, and gaze between speakers and listeners during face-to-face dialogue. One experiment involves a speaker telling a story to a listener, and examines when and how the listener provides evidence of his/her understanding in the form of backchannel responses (e.g., head nods, uh huh, okay, etc.) as well as the extent to which speakers monitor the listener for this evidence. Both the speaker and the listener are videotaped, and the speaker's eye-movements are recorded via a free-head eye-tracker. A database is being constructed from detailed annotations of the digitized video recordings. The database will allow tests of hypotheses concerning how conversants establish and coordinate the updating of their common ground as the dialogue proceeds. One important application of the insight gained from this research is the development of more effective human-robot interaction systems, which currently is being explored in a collaborative project funded by the Office of Naval Research.
Finally, my research interests include bilingualism and second (foreign) language learning. The questions of interest include the influence of morphosyntactic representations in individuals' native or first language on their processing and learning of this level of representation in their second language (e.g., Scheutz and Eberhard, 2004).
Selected Publications
Ashenfelter, K. T. & Eberhard, K. M. (2007). Effects of verb complexity on speech errors. Memory and Cognition, 35, 1525-1539.
Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., and Bock, K. (2005). Making sense of syntax: Number agreement in sentence production. Psychological Review, 112, 531-559.
Bock, K., Eberhard, K. M., and Cutting, J. C. (2004). Producing pronoun number. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 159-323.
Scheutz, M., and Eberhard, K. (2004). Effects of morphosyntactic gender features in bilingual language processing. Cognitive Science, 28, 559-588.
Chambers, C. G., Tanenhaus, M. K., Eberhard, K. M., Filip, H., and Carlson, G. N. (2002). Circumscribing referential domains in real-time language comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 30-49.
Spivey, M. J., Tanenhaus, M. K., Eberhard, K. M., and Sedivy, J. C. (2002) Effects of visual context in the resolution of temporary syntactic ambiguities in spoken language comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 45, 447-481.
Bock, K., Eberhard, K. M., Cutting, J. C., Meyer, A. S., and Schriefers, H. (2001). Some attractions of verb agreement. Cognitive Psychology, 43, 83-128.
Eberhard, K. M. (1999). The effect of conceptual number on the production of subject-verb agreement in English. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 147-164.
Eberhard, K.M., Spivey-Knowlton, M.J., Sedivy, J.C., and Tanenhaus, M.K. (1995). Eye movements as a window into real-time spoken language comprehension in natural contexts. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 24, 409-436.
Tanenhaus, M.K., Spivey-Knowlton, M.J., Eberhard, K.M., and Sedivy, J.C. (1995). Integration of visual and linguistic information in spoken language comprehension. Science, 268, 1632-34.
For a complete list of publications see the Curriculum Vitae
last update: January 2008