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Michael Tanenhaus

Michael Tanenhaus is an American linguist, author, and lecturer. He is a professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester. He is also the Director of the Center for Language Sciences at the University of Rochester.

Tanenhaus’ research focuses on processes which underlie real-time spoken language and reading comprehension. He is also interested in the continuous relationship between linguistic and various non-linguistic inputs.

Biography

Tanenhaus grew up in New York and Iowa City. He was raised in a home conducive to academics and learning. His father was a political scientist and his mother always surrounded the family with books and literature. He obtained his Bachelor of Science from the University of Iowa in Speech Pathology and Audiology. Tanenhaus received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1978. He immediately began teaching as an Assistant Professor, and then an Associate Professor at Wayne State University. Tanenhaus joined the faculty at the University of Rochester in 1983. He continues to be an involved faculty member, teaching Brain and Cognitive Sciences as well as linguistics. He has also been the Director of the Center for Language Sciences since 2003.

Eye Tracking

"While Tanenhaus was not the first to notice the connection between eye movements and attention, he and his team were the first to systematically record how the technology could be used to analyze language comprehension(Hauser, 2004, p.2)." In order to capture the movement of the eye, an eye tracker is placed around the head of the subject. From this, researchers are able to watch the movement of a person’s eye and make inferences about the subjects cognitive processes. Just and Carpenter (1980) hypothesized that there is “no appreciable lag between what is fixated and what is processed (p.331)” If this idea is correct we should be able to understand a subjects thought process by tracking the way they look at different words or objects.

Representative Research

Integration of Visual and Linguistic Information in Spoken Language Comprehension

In this study Tanenhaus looked at visual context and its effects on language comprehension. Tanenhaus wanted to investigate whether comprehension of language is informationally encapsulated, as thought by many theorists and researchers including Jerry Fodor.

Tanenhaus used eye tracking software and hardware to record the movement of the subject’s eyes as they listened to phrases and manipulated objects in a scene. Tanenhaus used phrases which contained syntactic ambiguities. For example "Put the apple on the towel in the box." "On the towel" is ambiguous because the subject is not sure whether "towel" is a modifier or a destination. "Put the apple that's on the towel in the box" served as the control condition because "that's" is a disambiguating word. Similar syntactic ambiguities have been used to show evidence for modularity within syntactic processing. He felt that a visual context would be just enough to influence the analysis of the ambiguities.

When the subject is presented with the first scene, in Figure A, they become confused. We see this by the many eye movements of the subjects who are not quite sure which items to manipulate. In the second scene the subject clearly understands the sentence more easily. In this scene the pencil is replaced by another apple on a napkin. This disambiguates the phrase because the subject understands that on the towel is modifying the apple, and is not referring to a destination.

The results strongly supports the hypothesis that language comprehension, specifically at the syntactic level, is informed by visual information. This is a clearly non-modular result. These results also seem to support Just and Carpenter’s “Strong Eye Mind Hypothesis” that rapid mental processes which make up the comprehension of spoken language can be observed by eye movements.

Actions and Affordances in Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution

Using a similar task to the previous study, Tanenhaus took this next method one step farther by not only monitoring eye movements, but also looking at properties of the candidates within the scenes. Subjects heard a sentence like “Pour the egg in the bowl over the flour,” “Pour the egg that’s in the bowl over the flour” was used as a control. The first scene, in Figure B, was called a "compatible competitor" due to the fact that both eggs in this scene were in liquid form. During the phrase "in the bowl" the participants became confused as to which egg to use. In the next scene there was an "incompatible competitor" because one egg was solid and one egg was liquid. In this case it was much easier for the subject to chose which one was in a state in which it could be "poured". The results suggest that referents were assessed in terms of how compatible they were with the instructions. This supports the hypothesis that non-linguistic domain restrictions can influence syntactic ambiguity resolution. The participants applied situation specific, contextual properties to the way in which they followed these instructions. The results run counter to the idea that we process these instructions semantically because we see how much the visual information and context play a role in the processing.

Books

Tanenhaus has collaborated with others to edit two books. His first book “Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Perspective from Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology, and Artificial Intelligence” was published in 1988. This book contains eighteen original papers which look at the concept of Lexical Ambiguity Resolution. His most recent work “Approaches to Studying World- Situated Language Use: Bridging the Language and Product and Language as Action Traditions” was published in 1994. This book was published to show the importance of looking at both social and cognitive aspects when studying language processing. The book is made up of papers and reports of relevant experimental findings.

References

Carpenter, P. & Just, M. (1980). A theory of reading: from eye fixation to comprehension. Psychology Review, 87, 329–354.

Chambers, et. al (2004). Actions and Affordances in Syntactics Ambiguity Resolutions. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 30(3), 687-696.

Hauser, Scott (2004). The Eyes Have It. Rochester Review.

Tanenhaus, et. al (1995). Integration of Visual and Linguistic Information in Spoken Language Comprehension. Science, 268, 1632-1634.

Tanenhaus, Michael - Faculty Website. University of Rochester.