Postdoctoral Research Associate
Department of Psychology
Program in Neural, Informational and Behavioral Sciences
University of Southern California
Ph.D. in Cognitive Science,
Centre for Cognitive Science,
University of Edinburgh
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Current Projects
My current research centers around the study of performance
constraints on the learning and processing of language and other
complex sequentially structured information. Below are some of the
closely related experimental and a computational projects that I am
currently working on (clicking on links will bring up an abstract):
I am currently applying a self-paced reading task (with on-line
grammaticality judgments) to test predictions emerging from a
connectionist model (Christiansen, in
preparation) concerning the processing of sentences with multiple
instances of the same recursive structure (Christiansen &
MacDonald, in preparation).
I am working on a paper reappraising the poverty of stimulus
argument(s) in the light of recent evidence from developmental
psychology, probabilistic approaches to adult language processing, and
new insights about learning in neural networks (Seidenberg, Allen, Christiansen & MacDonald,
in preparation).
I am also continuing my work on the modeling of speech segmentation,
extending previous work (Allen &
Christiansen, 1996; Christiansen, Allen
& Seidenberg, in press) to deal with noisy input (Christiansen & Allen, in preparation).
A series of simulations seeks to demonstrate that
nonlinguistic limitations on learning in recurrent neural networks may
explain why natural languages are predominately either head-first or
head-last (Christiansen & Devlin, in preparation).
An experiment is in progress (motivated by the ideas outlined in Morrison & Christiansen, 1995),
testing aphasic patients and normal controls on an artificial grammar
learning task [collaborator: Richard Shillcock, University of
Edinburgh].
I also plan to develop a neural network simulator that allows for the
modeling of both comprehension and production within the same
recurrent network (similar to the approach taken in Christiansen & Chater, in submission). This
simulator would permit further computational studies of speech
segmentation and syntactic processing, investigating ways in which
production and comprehension may interact and influence each other
both during acquisition and adult processing.
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Publications
Refereed Articles
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Last modified: January 15, 1997.
Address
Program in Neural, Informational and Behavioral Sciences
University of Southern California
University Park MC-2520
Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520
Phone: (213) 740-6299
Fax: (213) 740-5687
Email: morten@gizmo.usc.edu
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Please email suggestions/errors to mhc27@cornell.edu |