UB’s Mauner, Koenig Receive $462,000 NIH Grant to Study How Mind Represents, Uses Information Encoded in Words

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Two faculty members in the UB College of Arts and Sciences have been awarded a three-year, $462,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to examine how information about words is represented in the mind and used when reading and talking.

Gail Mauner, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychology, and Jean Pierre Koenig, Ph.D., assistant professor of linguistics, are co-principal investigators on the project, titled "Lexical Encoding and Processing of Event Participants."

The practical goal, says Mauner, is to use information obtained through the research to study those who have brain pathologies associated with knowledge -- that is, disorders affecting a person's ability to glean meaning from the representation of a fact -- in order to better diagnose or assess their deficiencies and offer direction to rehabilitation efforts.

Although based in different academic disciplines, both researchers are cognitive scientists who study the interplay between language processing and meaning.

Mauner's primary areas of research are in language processing and reading comprehension.

"In its broadest outlines, my research focuses on the processing of anaphoric expressions, inferencing, and on the processing of referential expressions in both neurologically intact adults and in patients with aphasic language impairments," she says.

Her current interests include the study of the kinds of unexpressed information readers and hearers include in the representations they form for sentences, and how and from what sources unexpressed information comes to be included in sentence representations.

In particular, Mauner is interested in determining what kinds of information persons access in verb-phrase anaphors in the representations they have already formed for sentences and discourses. This research focus relates specifically to the NIH study.

An anaphor in this instance refers to the use of a grammatical substitute -- a pro-verb, which is a form of the verb "do" -- to refer to a preceding word or group of words, as in "You run faster than I do," instead of "You run faster than I do run."

She also is examining the kinds of information aphasic readers use during language processing as a way of constraining models of normal language processing.

Koenig's primary research focus is on the interface between syntax and semantics. His interests include formal -- as well as cognitive -- semantics and syntax; unification-based grammar and natural language processing; computational linguistics, and Gricean pragmatics. He also is interested in theories of lexical knowledge and lexical productivity, underspecification in a hierarchical lexicon, and the application of knowledge representation tools to the study of grammatical knowledge.