Alex Fine
 |
Graduate Student, Brain & Cognitive Sciences |
Contact Information
- Meliora 403
- Brain & Cognitive Sciences
- University of Rochester
- Rochester, NY 14627-0268
- (585) 275-7187
Education
2006 BA, Linguistics and German, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Research Overview
In order to successfully communicate, humans must infer intended messages from noisy and ambiguous perceptual input. Research over the last three decades shows that comprehenders achieve this by using multiple sources of probabilistic information available in the linguistic signal and in the non-linguistic context. Less is known, however, about how it is that humans update and maintain their estimates of these probabilities, given new evidence (i.e. given experience throughout their lives). My main line of research involves using behavioral experiments (self-paced reading, eye-tracking) and corpora of spoken and written language to understand this process, mostly at the level of sentence comprehension/production. I use a variety of techniques from statistics and machine learning to pursue mechanistic and computational accounts of behavioral data obtained from experiments and corpora.
Selected Publications
- Fine, A. B. and Jaeger, T. F. (in preparation). Rational cue combination in syntactic comprehension.
- Fine, A. B., Jaeger, T. F., Farmer, T. A, and Qian, T. (under revision). Rapid expectation adaptation during syntactic comprehension. Cognition. Paper under revision. Please do not cite without permission. | pdf
- Fine, A.B. and Jaeger, T.F. (in press). Evidence for error-based implicit learning in adult language processing. Cognitive Science. | pdf
- Fine, A. B. and Jaeger, T. F. 2011. Language comprehension is sensitive to changes in the reliability of lexical cues. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. | pdf
- Farmer, T., Fine, A. B., and Jaeger, T. F. 2011. Implicit context-specific learning leads to rapid shifts in syntactic expectations. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. | pdf
- Fine, A.B., Qian, T., Jaeger, T.F., and Jacobs, R. 2010. Syntactic Adaptation in Language Comprehension. Proceedings of ACL Workshop on Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics, Uppsala, Sweden. | pdf
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