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 Associate Professor, Psychology, Linguistics, and Communication Sciences and Disorders 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 relationship between language processing difficulty and the amount of referential processing between a to-be-retrieved word or structure and the point of retrieval. Much of that work was published in Warren and Gibson (2002). Gibson and Warren (2004) investigated the psychological reality of intermediate traces, whereas Warren and Gibson (2005) investigated cleft structures-- but both continued to develop this theory and line of research. I have not been working on this specific theory for the past few years, although I continue to investigate syntactic complexity and its potential contribution to/interaction with other factors/effects (e.g. Warren & Dickey, 2011; Warren, Reichle, & Patson, 2011; Warren, White, & Reichle, 2009), as well as semantic/referential complexity/specificity (e.g. Patson & Warren, 2010a; Patson & Warren, 2011; Warren, 2003). I recently completed a small grant from NIH that funded a line of work investigating the way that people construct representations of events. In this work, my students and I have been probing when readers become sensitive to different kinds of semantic violations and the ramifications that this has for the organization of the comprehension system. This work grew out of the experiment reported in Rayner, Warren, Juhasz & Liversedge (2004). I have two papers with former graduate student Kerry McConnell, one demonstrating that readers showed earlier eye movement disruption to violations involving selectional restrictions/impossibility than to severe plausibility violations which were rated similarly unlikely (Warren & McConnell, 2007), the other demonstrating that even very strong contextual support does not always eliminate initial disruption to violations involving selectional restrictions/impossibility (Warren, McConnell, & Rayner, 2008). With my graduate student Nikole Patson, I investigated whether local syntactic relationships (i.e. theta assignment) affect the speed of detection for moderate plausibility violations, and found no speed up for violations within a theta-assigning relationship (Patson & Warren, 2010b). In Warren (in revision), I report an experiment showing that readers detect selectional restriction violations earlier than impossibility. This body of work suggests that readers' initial comprehension is not always guided by their full knowledge of the likelihood or impossibility of a particular event given a particular context, contrary to many current theories. Interestingly, the Patson & Warren (2010b) data suggest that the early detection of selectional restriction violations is not due to semantic processing being accomplished faster within a verb-argument relation than outside of one. In a series of grant proposals co-developed with Michael Walsh Dickey, I have been building a new theory of semantic processing that accounts for all of these data plus many others. 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, 2009). 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, 2009; Vanyukov, Reichle, Warren, & Degani, in revision). With Sarah White, we have been investigating the etiology of wrap-up effects in reading and using wrap-up effects to test the generalizability of E-Z Reader 10 (Warren, White, & Reichle, 2009; White, Warren, & Reichle, 2011). In some work I am spear-heading, we have been investigating the interleaving of lexical and higher-level language processing during reading, using E-Z Reader 10 as a source of predictions (Warren, Reichle, & Patson, 2011).