Linnaea Stockall

Current Research Projects

My work focuses on the earliest stages of linguistic information extraction and processing involved in the retrieval of individual words and parts of words, and in the combination of those pieces to form complex utterances. I am interested in how we store and process morphological constituents, how early, automatic morphological processing mechanisms handle irregularity, and how we assemble morphological constituents into interpretable words and phrases. I am also interested in how lexical semantic information is extracted and integrated into compositional semantic interpretations, and in how the semantics of roots interacts with the semantics of functional morphemes. In one way or another, almost all of my research centres on the morpho-syntax and morpho-semantics of verbs. Click the links below to read more.

1. Morphological Structure Building and Semantic Context. With Alexander Pollatsek
   
   
   

   We are using eyetracking measures to investigate how the meanings of ambiguous tri-morphemic strings like unlockable are computed.
   
   Experiment 1 embedded such ambiguous adjectives in contexts that favored one or the other interpretation (able to be locked, or not able to be locked). We found that prior context had no effects on the earliest stages of morphological interpretation, but instead found evidence to suggest that default parsing mechanisms combine with sub-string occurrence frequencies to determine an initial parse, which may then be revised to fit the context. This research was published in PBR in 2010: [pdf]
   
   Experiment 2 compares ambiguous trimorphs (unlockable) with words that are structurally ambiguous, but only have one semantically coherent parse (unsinkable) in order to further investigate the functions of a morphological parsing mechanism, and to tease apart morphological and semantic well-formedness considerations. We again find evidence for an initial default parsing preference for the ambiguous adjectives.



2. The Ingredients of Lexical Aspect With E. Matthew Husband and Alan Beretta
   

   Whether an event is interpreted as proceeding towards a definite end point or not is a function both of lexical semantic properties of the verb and of compositional/structural properties of the direct object DP with which that verb combines. We have been investigating these two sources of telicity and how they combine together in real time in a number of experiments, using lexical decision, self-paced reading, eye-tracking and MEG.



3. Decomposing Irregular Allomorphs With Alec Marantz and Joseph Fuchter
   

   Recent work establishing an evoked neuromagnetic response peaking approximately 170ms after the onset of visual presented linguistic material and originating in left fusiform gyrus that is sensitive to form based morphological constituent detection (Sollomyak and Marantz (2009), Zweig and Pylkkänen (2008)) makes it possible to test the predictions made in my dissertation that even irregular allomorphs are subject to early decomposition. We are currently running both a masked priming and a single word lexical decision experiment designed to investigate this process.



4. Evolution of Semantic Systems with Asifa Majid, Fiona Jordan and Michael Dunn
   
   text from EoSS homepage:

   A joint research initiative between the Evolutionary Processes in Language and Culture group and Categories across Language and Cognition project at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics.

   The main aim of the EoSS project is to investigate how meanings vary over space and change over time. We focus on different kinds of categories: containers (kinds of objects), colour (attributes of objects), body parts (parts of objects), and spatial relations (how objects are related to one another). For more background information click here.

   This study aims to collect data from 20 participants in each of 50 languages from the Indo-European language family. The project is estimated to run for approximately three years; the data collection phase is planned to take two years starting January 2011. The project is carried out by members of the EoSS research consortium.

   We are collecting the data for English.

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Papers

In preparation/Manuscripts

• Stockall, L. and Husband, E.M. How Lexical Is Lexical Aspect?
• Stockall, L. and Benatar, A. Processing the Mass/Count Distinction in English and French.

Submitted/In Press

• Fruchter, J., Stockall, L., and Marantz, A. Early decomposition effects during visual processing of past tense verbs: MEG masked priming evidence for form-based decomposition of irregular verbs
• Stockall, L. and Morris, J. Equivalent masked priming with irregularly and regularly inflected primes

• Pollatsek, A., Drieghe, D., Stockall, L. and de Almeida, R. (2010) The Interpretation of Ambiguous Trimorphemic Words in Sentence Context. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 17(1), 88-94. [pdf]
• Stockall, L. and Marantz, A. (2006) A single route, full decomposition model of morphological complexity: MEG evidence. The Mental Lexicon.1:1, 85-123. [pdf]
• Stockall, L. Stringfellow, A. and Marantz, A. (2004) The precise timecourse of lexical activation: MEG measurements of the effects of frequency, probability and density in lexical decision. Brain and Language. 90:1-3, 88-94. [pdf]
• Ko, H. Wagner, M., Stockall, L., Kouider, S., and A. Marantz, (2004). Form vs. Meaning in Visual Word Recognition: An MEG study using Masked Priming. In Halgren E, Ahlfors S, Hämäläinen M. & Cohen D. (eds.) Biomag 14, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Biomagnetism, p 300.
• Stockall, L. and A. Marantz, (2004). The English Irregular Past Tense: MEG evidence for morphological decomposition. In In Halgren E, Ahlfors S, Hämäläinen M. & Cohen D. (eds.) Biomag 14, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Biomagnetism, p 308.
• Stockall, L. (2004) Magnetoencephalographic investigations of morphological identity and irregularity. PhD thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [pdf]

Recent Presentations

• 2011, June Converging evidence for early automatic, orthographic form based decomposition of regular and irregular allomorphs Talk given at 7th International Morphological Processing Conference, Dononstia/San Sebastian, Spain.
• 2011, June MEG & EEG investigations of irregular allomorphy. Talk given at QMUL Linguistics Luncheon
• 2010, September with Joanna Morris.ERP Evidence for Early Equivalent Masked Priming for Regular and Irregular Morphology Talk given at AMLaP 2010
• 2010, September with Alexander Pollatsek, Denis Drieghe and Roberto de Almeida.Interpreting Morphologically Complex Words: Eye-movement Measures of Structural and Semantic Ambiguity Talk given at AMLaP 2010
• 2010, March with Ashley Benatar. Retrieving and Processing the Mass/Count Distinction. Poster given at CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, 2010
• 2010, March with E. Matthew Husband. Lexical Telicity? Processing Evidence for and against Verbal Telicity. Poster given at CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, 2010

Teaching

Autumn 2011

• LIN603/7703 - Experimental Linguistics
• LIN306 - Research Methods in Linguistics. With Erez Levon

Spring 2011

• LIN213 - Language and Mind
• LIN101 - Language Acquisition

Teaching Prior to Queen Mary

Autumn 2010

• LIN603 - Experimental Linguistics

Spring 2010

• CS-0125 Language Acquisition
• CS-0209 Linguistic Field Methods

Fall 2009

• CS-0117 The Theory of Language.
• CS-0207 The Nature of Language: Morphology & Semantics.

Winter 2009

• LING353 - Psycholinguistics

Winter 2008

• LING353 - Psycholinguistics - see Moodle for web resources
• LING398P - Lexical Categories
• LING425 - Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar - see Moodle for web resources

Fall 2007

• LING380 - Morphology
• LING398Q - Neurolinguistics
• LING415 - Advanced Syntax

Winter 2007

• LING353 - Psycholinguistics. Concordia University.

Fall 2005

• PSY493(W)-Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Michigan State University.