I am also interested in the interface between domain-general cognitive mechanisms and language processing. During online sentence comprehension, people’s ability to incrementally compute various sources of information derive from visual context, discourse context, long-term linguistic knowledge and real-time language input fundamentally affects their speed to reach the interpretation as well as the final result of the interpretation. Domain-general cognitive mechanisms such as executive functions, declarative memory, and prediction shape individual’s language processing schemes and capacities.
Role of executive function:
- Qi Z., Love J., Fisher C. L., Brown-Schmidt S. (Submitted) Referential context and executive functioning influence children’s resolution of syntactic ambiguity.
- Qi Z., Fisher C. L., Brown-Schmidt S. (2011) On recovering from ‘kindergarten path’ errors: referential context and executive functioning influence children’s online ambiguity resolution. Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing.
Role of declarative memory:
- Brown-Schmidt S., Qi Z., Duff M. (2014). Contributions of hippocampal-dependent declarative memory to on-line processing of global syntactic ambiguity. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference
Role of prediction:
- Qi Z., Garnsey S. M. (In Prep) Prediction-based distributional learning of novel verb bias: an ERP study.
- Qi Z., Garnsey S. M. (2012) Neurocognitive plasticity in verb bias learning: an ERP study. Cognitive Neuroscience Society.