607 LRDC 3939 O’Hara St. Pittsburgh, PA 15260 412 624 7460 my first name AT pitt DOT edu Research Scientist, Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh Assistant Professor, Psychology and Linguistics Departments, University of Pittsburgh Education 1996 graduate of Yale College, B.A. in Cognitive Psychology 2001 graduate of MIT, PhD in Cognitive Science 2001-2003 Postdoctoral fellow, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Current Research The general question that drives my research is how people understand language. I’m interested in characterizing the mental system that allows a reader or listener to read or hear a string of words and form an appropriate mental representation based on those words and a mental representation of the context. My work is informed by formal linguistics as well as cognitive psychology. One of my primary lines of work investigates the way that memory constrains the process of sentence comprehension. In this work I primarily use self-paced reading to investigate what kinds of factors make it more difficult to retrieve words or structure from early in a sentence at a later point in the sentence. In my PhD thesis, I developed a theory about the way that increased referential processing between the to-be-retrieved word or structure and the point of retrieval increases difficulty. Some of that work was published in the Warren & Gibson (2002) Cognition paper. The Warren & Gibson (2005) LCP paper on clefts continued to develop this theory and line of research. In a paper we are currently revising, Kerry McConnell, Dan Grodner and I have used eye-tracking to test some assumptions about the relationship between processing resources and sentence complexity. I have just completed a small grant from NIH that funded a line of work investigating the way that people construct representations of events. In this work we investigated the time course over which plausibility violations affect the eye-movement record in reading. This work grew out of the experiment reported in Rayner, Warren, Juhasz & Liversedge (2004) in JEP:LMC. With former graduate student Kerry McConnell, I have two papers investigating the influence of context and degree of implausibility on eye movements to plausibility violations (Warren, McConnell, & Rayner, 2008; Warren & McConnell, 2007). My graduate student Nikole Patson and I are currently revising a paper that investigated whether local syntactic relationships affect the speed of plausibility violation detection. We have a few other experiments in this vein currently in the data collection stage. My colleague Erik Reichle and I have a grant from the NIH to fund a line of work to develop reinforcement learning agent models of eye movement control during reading. With Erik's student Patryk Laurent, we have been investigating questions of how eye-movement control in reading develops and what role higher level language processing plays in influencing eye movements during reading. With former student Kerry McConnell, we modified the E-Z Reader model of eye movement control in reading to account for post lexical processing effects (Reichle, Warren, & McConnell, in press). With students Tamar Degani and Polina Vanyukov, we have been investigating the issue of whether attention is allocated serially or in parallel during reading (Reichle, Vanyukov, Laurent, & Warren, in press).