Research Interests Psycholinguistics Lab Ongoing Projects Representative Publications Current and Past Students Course Materials: Language and Mind

Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies

Research Interests

Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics; sentence comprehension and sentence production; lexical morphology; agreement

Approach
My research focuses on the mental representations and processing mechanisms that enable humans to produce and comprehend sentences and morphologically complex words. Of primary interest to me is how principles of grammar relate to processing representations and the mental operations that are defined over these representations.

In the domain of sentence processing, for example, my recent research includes studies of

• how we calculate agreement relations in the planning of spoken sentences
• how the mental representations of grammatical elements shape the course of incremental sentence planning and
• how grammatical constraints on referentially dependent expressions--pronouns, reflexives and reciprocals--interact with other sources of knowledge in the course of interpreting these linguistic expressions.

My studies of lexical representation and processing concern the role of compositional procedures in the comprehension and production of morphologically complex words (e.g., suffixed words like 'natural' and 'swims', or compounds like 'shipwreck'). In particular, this research attempts to distinguish between cases of whole-word processing (based on the retrieval of stored representations) and processing that is directly dependent on the capacity to form new representational units by the application of affixing or compounding procedures.

Most of my research is experimental in character, using data from normal subjects and from individuals with acquired language impairments. However, I am also engaged in collaborative research with my colleagues from the Cognitive Science Department on computational modeling of sentence planning [Robert Frank] and pronoun and anaphor comprehension [Robert Frank and Don Mathis].

In addition to these primary interests, my research activities have been strongly shaped by the interests of the graduate students and visiting scholars who have worked in the Psycholinguistics Laboratory. Some of the recent work that I have done in collaboration with these colleagues and advisees examined:

• the effect of morphological markedness in processing grammatical agreement
• the role of biases in learning phonological generalizations
• the on-line interpretation of sentence aspect
• the prosody of wh-questions
• the role of lexical context in phoneme perception
• the role of verbal semantics in shaping the focus of attention in connected discourse.

Ongoing Projects

• Agreement in Language Production
• Processing Lexical Morphology
• Auditory Language Processing
• Reference and Recoverability
• Aspects of Sentence Comprehension

Representative Publications

Badecker, W. (in press). A feature principle for partial agreement. To appear in Lingua. [doi:10.1016/j.lingua.2006.06.006]

Badecker, W., & Kuminiak, F. (2007). Morphology, agreement, and working memory retrieval in sentence production: Evidence from gender and case in Slovak. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 65-85. [doi:10.1016/j.jml.2006.08.004]

Badecker, W. 2005. Speech perception following focal brain injury. In D. Pisoni & R. Remez (eds.), Handbook of Speech Perception (pp. 524-545), New York: Blackwell.

Allen, M., Badecker, W., & Osterhout, L. 2003. Morphological analysis in sentence processing: An ERP study. Language and Cognitive Processes, 18, 405-430. [doi:10.1080/01690960244000054]

Badecker, W., and M. Allen. 2002. Morphological parsing and the perception of lexical identity: A masked priming study of stem-homographs. Journal of Memory and Language, 47, 125-144. [doi:10.1006/jmla.2001.2838]

Badecker, W., and K. Straub. 2002. The processing role of structural constraints on the interpretation of pronouns and anaphors. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 28, 748-769.

Badecker, W. 2001. Lexical composition and the production of compounds: Evidence from neologistic errors in naming. Language and Cognitive Processes, 16, 337- 366.

Allen, M., and W. Badecker. 1999. Stem homograph inhibition and stem allomorphy: Representing and processing inflected forms in a multi-level lexical system. Journal of Memory and Language, 41, 105-123. [doi:10.1006/jmla.1999.2639]

Badecker, W., and A. Caramazza. 1998. Morphology in aphasia. In Zwicky, A., and Spencer, A. (eds.). Handbook of Morphology (pp. 390-405). Oxford: Blackwell

Badecker,W. 1997.Levels of morphological deficit: Indications from inflectional regularity. Brain & Language, 60, 360-380. [doi:10.1006/brln.1997.1845]

Badecker, W., Rapp, B., and Caramazza, A. 1996. Lexical morphology and the two orthographic routes. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 13, 161-175.

Badecker, W. 1996. Representational properties common to phonological and orthographic output systems. Lingua, 99, 55-83. [doi:10.1016/0024-3841(96)00005-8]

Badecker, W., Miozzo, M., and Zanuttini, R. (1995) The two-stage model of lexical retrieval: Evidence from a case of anomia with selective preservation of grammatical gender. Cognition, 57, 193-216. [doi:10.1016/0010-0277(95)00663-J]

Laudanna, A., Badecker, W., and Caramazza, A.. (1992) Processing inflectional and derivational morphology.'' Journal of Memory and Language, 31, 333-348. [doi:10.1016/0749-596X(92)90017-R]

Badecker, W., and Caramazza, A.. (1991) Morphological composition in the lexical output system.'' Cognitive Neuropsychology, 8, 335-321.

Badecker, W., Hillis, A., and Caramazza, A.. (1990) Lexical morphology and its role in the writing process: Evidence from a case of acquired dysgraphia. Cognition, 35, 205-243. [doi:10.1016/0010-0277(90)90023-D]

Current and Past Students