Graduate Students

Joke Recognition and Processing

The research deals with the way in which different linguistic elements encourage people to recognize an utterance as a joke and to what extent joke recognition affects language processing with an emphasis on prediction mechanisms. In the research, I examined the effect of joke recognition on behavioral and neurophysiological measures.

Idioms and the Architecture of Grammar

The study of idioms has accompanied generative linguistic theory since its inception, but many open questions still remain. My research combines theoretical and experimental examination of the syntactic behavior of idioms by examining a number of features that are characteristic of idioms but not unique to them, such as figurativeness, conventionality, locality, and disjointedness, in an attempt to provide an explanation for their behavior and understand their place within the architecture of grammar.

Factors that influence the resolution of lexical ambiguity

I study factors that influence the choice of a particular meaning in words that have more than one meaning in the Hebrew language. In addition to factors that depend on the context and the frequency of the different meanings, I study the influence of other social factors. The research was conducted on both adults and children.

Sentence-Switching and the Modularity of the Linguistic System

My research deals with grammatical constraints on sentence-switching (code-switching). Through psycholinguistic experiments, I examine which code-switching patterns sound natural to bilingual speakers of Hebrew and English and which do not, and what this reveals about the way the linguistic system is organized. The goal of the research is to understand how two languages ​​are represented together within a single linguistic system, and how these findings can be incorporated into contemporary models of grammar. The research focuses on function words, interrogative sentences, and grammatical gender.

Production and Processing of Resumptive Pronouns

My research examines the production and processing of resumptive pronouns (RPs) in order to understand the interplay between cognitive constraints and linguistic rules. From a production perspective, I examine whether resumptive pronouns serve as a "rescue strategy" for complex syntactic design, or whether they can be a tool for "audience design", such as resolving syntactic ambiguity for the listener.

This work complements a joint research project (ISF-DFG) with Dr. Titus von der Melsburg and Prof. Aya Meltzer-Asher. In the project, we conduct experiments comparing the processing of repeated personal pronouns in Hebrew, where they are grammatical, and in Standard German and Alemannic, where they are ungrammatical or have limited use. By combining real-time processing measures such as eye tracking and comprehension measures, we aim to examine whether the processing of repeated personal pronouns differs substantially depending on their grammatical status in the language.

Grammatical competence in the processing of argument structure information

This work examines when, during processing by Hebrew speakers, thematic information associated with a verb becomes accessible, and how this thematic information influences the human language processor's decisions regarding the attachment choices of the neuter conjunction, as well as signaling the processing difficulty and the need for reanalysis.