26.4881, Support: Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Written Production / United Kingdom

Tue Nov 3 16:07:20 UTC 2015

LINGUIST List: Vol-26-4881. Tue Nov 03 2015. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 26.4881, Support: Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Written Production / United Kingdom

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Date: Tue, 03 Nov 2015 11:07:12
From: Mark Torrance [mark.torrance at ntu.ac.uk]
Subject: Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Psycholinguistics; Written Production, PhD, Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom

 Institution/Organization: Nottingham Trent University 
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 at ntu.ac.uk  

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