Gerry Altmann

Personal Details

Qualifications and Awards

Miscellaneous

Teaching

Misc:

Research

Research Area

Keywords: psycholinguistics; sentence processing; language-mediated eye movements; artificial grammar learning; computational modelling.

My current research is on the relationship between language and vision: If you show someone a scene depicting various people/objects, and they simultaneously hear a sentence describing something that may happen (e.g. 'the man will ride the motorbike'), the eyes start to look at the motorbike during the verb 'ride' they look towards whatever is most plausibly ridden by the man (so they won't look so much towards a child's scooter if there is one in the scene, even though it is technically rideable). It turns out that you get these same 'language-mediated' eye movements even when the scene to which the sentence refers is absent. So if you take the scene away before the person hears the sentence, the eyes look towards where the motorbike had been. There are, broadly, two aspects to this research: The first focuses primarily on what we can learn about language processing (specifically, the recruitment of different kinds of information as a sentence unfolds in time); the second focuses more on visual attention, and on the interpretation and mental representation of visual scenes. In the latter case, I am interested in the automaticity of eye movements, and the content of the mental representations of visual scenes that support these eye movements.

I also have an interest in computational modelling of the mapping between linguistic and visual information, although work to-date has been based primarily on modelling the emergence of linguistic rule-like behaviours.

Collaborators

Silvia Gennari (U. York: interpretation of visual scenes in respect of event structures)

Yuki Kamide (U. Dundee, UK: sentence intepretation)

Roger Ellingham (Consultant Opthalmologist, York District Hospital: clinical application of language-mediated eye movements in patients with visual impairment)

Kate Nation (U. Oxford: impairments of the language-vision mapping in children with comprehension difficulties).

Sharon Thompson-Schill & Nick Hindy (U. Pennsylvania, USA: brain imaging and the mental representation of event representations)

Brian McElree (New York University, USA: much like the Thompson-Schill collaboration but using a more complicated methodology, something called SAT...)

Asifa Majid (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen: eye movements and perception of causality)

Supervisees

Xierong Liu
Chris Rowson
Gitte Jørgensen

Grants

My current funding is from the ESRC (through to the end of 2011). Previous funding has included grants from The Medical Research Council (MRC), The Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), The Wellcome Trust, The Royal Society, The Hull-York Medical School, and others. Elsevier help out also, and are largely responsible for the funding of one of my PhD students.

Misc.

My research is supported by a combination of postdoctoral and postgraduate researchers, with occasional undergraduate project students, without whom very little could be accomplished on the two eye-trackers and miscellaneous other pieces of equipment used in the lab.

Publications

Altmann, G.T.M. and Mirkovic, J. (2009). Incrementality and prediction in human sentence processing. Cognitive Science, 33, 583-609.

Altmann, G.T.M. and Kamide, Y. (2009). Discourse-mediation of the mapping between language and the visual world: eye-movements and mental representation. Cognition, 111, 55-71.

Altmann, G.T.M. and Kamide, Y. (2007). The real-time mediation of visual attention by language and world knowledge: Linking anticipatory (and other) eye movements to linguistic processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 502-518.

Altmann, G.T.M. (2002). Learning and development in neural networks: the importance of prior experience. Cognition, 85(2), 43-50.

Altmann, G.T.M. (1997) The Ascent of Babel: An exploration of language, mind, and understanding. Oxford University Press.

Misc.

The above is just a selection of papers (and one book) that give a flavour of my research. A complete list can be viewed at http://homepage.mac.com/gerry_altmann/research/cv/cv.html

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