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  3. / Gibson, Ted Ph.D.
Gibson, Ted
Ph.D.
Professor of Cognitive Science
Brain & Cognitive Sciences

Building: 

46-3035
Email: egibson@mit.edu

Phone: 

6172538609
Lab website

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Research

Research in the Gibson Lab (“TedLab”) is aimed at investigating (1) why human languages look the way they do; (2) the relationship between culture and cognition, including language; and, most generally, (3) how people learn, represent and process language.

We use a variety of methods, including behavioral experiments (e.g., reading and listening studies, many simple methods in working with remote populations, dual-task experiments, individual differences studies), statistical modeling and corpus analyses. In collaboration with other labs we also use functional MRI, event-related potentials (ERPs) and eye-tracking.

The major lines of research pursued in the lab:

  1. Information processing and cross-linguistic universals
  2. The relationship between culture and cognition / language
  3. Language processing
    1. What are the informational constraints that affect language processing? The informational constraints we have investigated include:
      • Syntactic information
      • Lexical information
      • Plausibility (world knowledge) information
      • Prosodic information
      • Pragmatic inference
      • Discourse coherence information
      • Information structure
    2. Resource constraints (the working memory system underlying language processing)
      • What is the nature of the resource constraints in language processing and what is the best way of quantifying them?
      • To what extent is the working memory system underlying language processing domain-specific? The language constraints?
    3. Methodological questions about this research
      • The value of doing quantitative research in syntax and semantics
      • Meta-analysis in syntactic priming research
Teaching

9.59J Laboratory in psycholinguistics
9.012 Cognitive science

Publications

Gibson E, Fedorenko E. Weak quantitative standards in linguistics research. Trends Cogn Sci. 2010 Apr 1. [Epub ahead of print]

Tily H, Fedorenko E, Gibson E. The time-course of lexical and structural processes in sentence comprehension. Q J Exp Psychol (Colchester). 2010 May;63(5):910-27. Epub 2009 Sep 10.

Fedorenko E, Patel A, Casasanto D, Winawer J, Gibson E. Structural integration in language and music: evidence for a shared system. Mem Cognit. 2009 Jan;37(1):1-9.

Frank MC, Everett DL, Fedorenko E, Gibson E. Number as a cognitive technology: evidence from Pirah� language and cognition. Cognition. 2008 Sep;108(3):819-24. Epub 2008 Jun 10.

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MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

77 Massachusetts Avenue, Room 46-2005

Cambridge, MA 02139-4307 | (617) 253-5748

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