Roberto G. de Almeida

*Roberto G. de Almeida*
Associate Professor
(Ph.D., Rutgers University)
Office: SP-253.11 (Loyola Campus)
Department of Psychology
7141 Sherbrooke Street West
Concordia University
Montréal, Québec
Canada H4B 1R6
Phone 514-848-2424 - ext. 2232
Fax 514-848-4545
almeida@alcor.concordia.ca

Areas of Research Interest

Lexical Representation and Processing
Conceptual Representation
Sentence Processing
The Language-Vision Interface
Foundations of Cognitive Science
For more information, check the Psycholinguistics and Cognition Lab page

Courses

2008-2009, Winter: Cognition II: Concepts and Categories (PSYC 353) [access via Moodle]
1999-2009, Fall or Winter: Cognition I (PSYC 352) [new site on Moodle]
2005-2006, Winter: Special Topic Seminar: Memory (PSYC 721) (with Karen Li)
2005-2006, Fall, Winter: Cognitive Science Area Seminar (PSYC 670/845) (with all Cognitive Science area faculty)
2004-2005, Fall: Cognition II: Language & Concepts (PSYC 353)
2003-2004, Winter: Psychology of Language and Communication (PSYC 395)
2002-2003, Winter: Language and the Brain (SCOL 360B)
2002-2004, Winter: Perception and Cognition in Daily Life (PSYC 298W) (2004: PSYC 249)
2000-2001, Winter: Cognition II: Topics in Cognitive Science (PSYC 353)
1999-2000, Winter: Cognition II: Language & Concepts (PSYC 353)
1998-1999, First Term: Methods in Experimental Psycholinguistics (Ling 615) (with Gary Libben), University of Alberta
1997-1998, Second Term: Psycholinguistics (Ling 500) (with L. Stanford, G. Libben, & B. Derwing), University of Alberta
1996-1997, Fall & Spring: General Psychology (Psy 101, TA and Instructor), Rutgers University
1996, Summer: Principles of Cognitive Science (Psy 201, Instructor), Rutgers University
1995-1996, Fall & Spring: Quantitative Methods (Psy 200, TA and Instructor) Rutgers University
1995, Summer: Psychology of Language (Psy 351, Instructor), Rutgers University

Papers

Manouilidou, C., de Almeida, R. G., Schwartz, G., & Nair, N. P. V. (2009). Thematic roles in Alzheimer’s disease: Hierarchy violations in psychological predicates. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 22, 167-186. [.pdf | uncorrected proofs]
Manouilidou, C. & de Almeida, R. G. (in press). Canonicity in argument realization and verb semantic deficits in Alzheimer's disease. In S. Featherston & S. Winkler (Eds.). Process and Product in Empirical Linguistics. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. [.pdf | uncorrected proofs]

Derwing, B. L. & de Almeida, R. G. (in press). Non-chronometric experiments in linguistics. In Eddington, D. (Ed.). Experimental and Quantitative Linguistics. Munich: Lincom. [.pdf | early draft]
de Almeida, R. G. & Dwivedi, V. D. (2008). Coercion without lexical decomposition: Type-shifting effects revisited. Canadian Journal of Linguistics, 53, 301-328. [.pdf]
Pollatsek, A., Drieghe, D., Stockall, L., & de Almeida, R. G. (submitted). The interpretation of ambiguous trimorphemic words in sentence context. [.pdf | draft]
de Almeida, R. G. Di Nardo, J. C., & von Grunau, M. W. (submitted). Understanding sentences in dynamic scenes. [.pdf | draft]
de Almeida, R. G. & Mobayyen, F. (submitted). Semantic memory organization for verb concepts: Proactive Interference as a function of content and structure. [draft]
de Almeida, R. G. (2007). Cognitive science as paradigm of interdisciplinarity: The case of lexical concepts. In J. Audy & M. Morosini (Eds.) Interdisciplinarity in Science and at the University. Porto Alegre, EdiPUCRS. [.pdf | proofs]
de Almeida, R. G. (2006). On the status of "linguistic psychology" and the language faculty. In G. Wiebe, G. Libben, T. Priestly, R. Smyth, & S. Wang (Eds.), Phonology, Morphology, and the Empirical Imperative: Papers in Honour of Bruce Derwing . Taipei: Crane Publishing [.pdf | draft]
Mobayyen, F. & de Almeida, R. G. (2005). The influence of semantic and morphological complexity of verbs on sentence recall: Implications for the nature of conceptual representation and category-specific deficits. Brain and Cognition, 57, 168-171. [.pdf | proofs]
Lacroix, G. L., Constantinescu, I., Cousineau, D., de Almeida, R. G., Segalowitz, N., & von Grunau, M. W. (2005). Attentional blink differences between adolescent dyslexic and normal readers. Brain and Cognition, 57, 115-119. [.pdf | uncorrected proofs]
de Almeida, R. G. & Libben, G. (2005). Changing morphological structures: The effect of sentence context on the interpretation of structurally ambiguous English trimorphemic words. Language and Cognitive Processes, 20, 373-394. [.pdf ] [ Also in: R. Frost, J. Grainger & K. Rastle (Eds.) Current Issues in Morphological Processing . London: Psychology Press]
Derwing, B. L. & de Almeida, R. G. (2005). Métodos experimentais em lingüística. In M. Maia & I. Finger (Eds.), Processamento da Linguagem. Pelotas: Educat. [.pdf | draft]
Lacroix, G., Segalowitz, N., von Grünau, M. W., Gunrsey, R., G. de Almeida, R. G., Borokhovski, E., Wada, N., & Constantinescu, I. (2005). Sciences cognitives appliqués et habilités langagières de base. In Pierre, S. (Ed.) Developpement, Integration et Evaluation des Technologies de Formation et D'apprentissage-- D.I.V.A. Montreal, Presses Internationales Polytechnique.
de Almeida, R. G. (2004). The effect of context on the processing of type-shifting verbs. Brain and Language, 90, 249-261.[.pdf]
de Almeida, R. G. & Libben, G. (2002) Compound prelexical decomposition: Evidence from a masked priming paradigm. Folia Linguistica, 36, 97-115. [.pdf].
Segalowitz, N. & de Almeida, R. G. (2002). Conceptual representation of verbs in bilinguals: Semantic field effects and a second language performance paradox. Brain and Language, 81, 517-531. [.pdf].
Libben, G. & de Almeida, R. G. (2002). Is there a morphological parser? In S. Bendjaballah, W. U. Dressler, O. E. Pfeiffer & M. D. Voeikova (Eds.) Morphology 2000. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. [.pdf].

de Almeida, R. G. (2001). Conceptual deficits without features: A view from atomism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 24(3): 482-483. [.pdf].
de Almeida, R. G. (1999) What do category-specific semantic deficits tell us about the representation of lexical concepts? Brain and Language, 68, 241-248. [.pdf].

Libben, G., Derwing, B., & de Almeida, R. G. (1999) Ambiguous Novel Compounds and Models of Morphological Parsing. Brain and Language, 68, 378-386. [.pdf].
de Almeida, R. G., van de Velde, C., von Grunau, M. W., & Galera, C. (in preparation). Looking at objects of verbs: Tracking the time course of visual-linguistic interaction during language comprehension.
Libben, G., Derwing, B., & de Almeida, R. G. (in preparation) Ambiguous Novel Compounds and Prelexical Parsing.

de Almeida, R. G. & Fodor, J. A. (in preparation). Against lexical decomposition again: Some psycholinguistic evidence.

de Almeida, R. G. (in preparation). Causatives and lexical atomism.

Selected Conference Presentations

Manouilidou, C. & de Almeida, R. G. (2009). On the psychological reality of verb typologies. Paper presented at the Verb Typologies conference. Ghent, Belgium, February.
Stockall, L, de Almeida, R. G., von Grünau, M. W., Guay , A., Petropoulou, A. & Sodo, D. (2008). Early compound constituent processing by the two hemispheres: Behavioral and MEG evidence. Paper presented at the International Morphology Meeting. Vienna, February.
Manouilidou, C., de Almeida, R. G., Nair , V., & Schwartz, G. (2008). Verb thematic roles and thematic hierarchy: Evidence from the performance of Alzheimer's Patients. Paper presented at Linguistic Evidence Conference. Tübingen, Germany, January.
Di Sciullo, A-M., de Almeida, R.G., Manouilidou, C., & Dwivedi, V.D. (2007). This poster reads clearly: Processing English middle constructions. Poster presented at the at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing conference. Turku, Finland, August 25.
Roncero, C., Smyth, R., Kennedy, J.M., & de Almeida, R. G. (2007) Online processing differences between metaphors and similies. Poster presented at the at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing conference. Turku, Finland, August 24.
Libben, G., Borgwaldt, S., Bolger, P., Kemps, R., de Almeida, R. G. (2007). Ambiguous roots in context. Paper presented at the Fifth International Workshop on Morphological Processing. Marseille, July.
Lacroix, G. L., Constantinescu, I., Segalowitz, N., de Almeida, R. G., & von Grünau, M. W. (2006). The relation between semantic memory and attentional blink. 47th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society. Houston, TX, November.
de Almeida, R. G. & Dwivedi, V. (2006) Are lexical causatives semantically complex? Evidence from sentence recall and acceptability judgment. Poster presented at the Fifth International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Montreal, October.
de Almeida, R. G., Novaes, C., & Libben, G. (2006). Processing unambiguous trimorphemic words in (Brazilian) Portuguese. Poster presented at the Fifth International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Montreal, October.
Mobayyen, F., de Almeida, R. G., Kehayia, E., Schwartz, G., & Nair, V. (2006). The organization of semantic memory: Evidence from an investigation of verb-specific semantic dissociations in dementia of the Alzheimer type. Poster presented at the Fifth International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, Montreal, October.
de Almeida, R. G., Houston, S., Kehayia, E., & Libben, G. (2006). Processing ambiguous trimorphemic words in context: Evidence from aphasia. Paper presented at the VII Science of Aphasia conference. Alghero, Italy, August.
de Almeida, R. G., Di Nardo, J., & von Grünau, M. W. (2005). Understanding sentences in dynamic scenes: probing the locus of the interaction between language and vision. Talk given at the 13 th European Conference on Eye Movements. Bern, Switzerland, August.
Borgwaldt, S., de Almeida, R. G., Kemps, R., & Libben, G. (2005). Barking up the wrong tree: pre-lexical morphological parsing in sentences. Paper presented at the Annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science. Montreal, June.
de Almeida, R. G. (2004). Type-shifting verbs and semantic (de)composition. Paper presented at the (Language) Interfaces conference. Pescara, Italy, July.
de Almeida, R. G., Madon, Z., van de Velde, C., Di Nardo, J., Godfrey, J., & von Grünau, M. W., (2004). Verb-driven shifts of attention during sentence comprehension and dynamic scene processing. Journal of Vision, 4 (8), 828a.
de Almeida, R. G., van de Velde, C., von Grünau, M. W., & Galera, C. (2003). (Eye-)tracking the time course of visual and linguistic integration: the effect of verb-conceptual restrictions. Journal of Vision, 3 (9), 308a.
de Almeida, R. G., van de Velde, C., von Grunau, M. W., Galera, C., Madon, Z., & Godfrey, J. (2003). The interaction between verbs and objects in a modular architecture. Poster presented at the 12th European Conference on Eye Movements. Dundee, Scotland, August.
Fernandez, E., Fodor, J. D., de Almeida, R. G., Bradley, D. & Quinn, D. (2003). Relative clause attachment in Canadian French: Prosodic boundary or F0-matching? Poster presented at the Sixteenth CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, March.

Mobayyen, F. & de Almeida, R. G. (2002). Memory for verbs: Recall as a function of semantic and morphological complexity. Poster presented at the Third International Conference on the Mental Lexicon. Banff, October.
Constantinescu, I., & de Almeida, R. G. (2002). Sentence processing in learning disabled adolescents: The effect of verb transitivity preference. Poster presented at the Theoretical and Experimental Neuropsychology (TENNET) conference. Montreal, June.
Mobayyen, F. & de Almeida, R. G. (2002). Semantic memory organization for verbs: Proactive Interference as a function of content and structure. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science. Vancouver, June.
van de Velde, C., de Almeida, R. G., von Grunau, M. W., & Galera, C. (2002). Tracking the time course of visual-linguistic integration: Verbs in search of their objects. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science. Vancouver, June.
Constantinescu, I. & de Almeida, R. G. (2002). The effect of verb transitivity preferences in sentence comprehension by LD readers. Poster presented at the Fifteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. New York, March 22.
de Almeida, R. G., van de Velde, C., von Grunau, M. W., & Galera, C. (2001) Looking at objects of verbs: Visual representations help only post-linguistic operations during sentence comprehension. Paper presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing conference. Saarbrucken, Germany, September 19.
Constantinescu, I. & de Almeida, R. G. (2001) Verb processing during sentence comprehension by LD adolescents. Poster presented at the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science Conference. Quebec City, June 25.
Turbide, J. & de Almeida, R. G. (2001) Sentence propositional complexity as a probe into the nature of causative concepts. Poster presented at the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science Conference. Quebec City, June 25.

Libben, G. & de Almeida R. G. (2001) Activation and conflict resolution in prelexical morphological parsing. Paper presented at the Morphology Workshop, Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics. Nijmegen, The Netherlands, June 13.

van de Velde, C., de Almeida, R. G., Galera, C., von Grunau, M. W. (2001). Monitoring saccades during a visual search task to uncover the time-course of visual-linguistic integration. Poster presented at ARVO (Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology) Annual Meeting. Fort Lauderdale, May 2.

Libben, G. & de Almeida, R. G. (2000). Ambiguous suffixed words and the architecture of the mental lexicon. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Alberta Linguistic Society. Banff, October 28.
de Almeida, R. G., van de Velde, C., Galera, C., & von Grunau, M. (2000). Looking for objects of verbs: the use of visual information in the access to conceptual-structure representations. Paper presented at the Second International Conference on the Mental Lexicon. Montreal, October 18.

Tesolin, S. B. & de Almeida, R. G. (2000).Accessing arguments and conceptual fillers of verbs. Poster presented at the Second International Conference on the Mental Lexicon. Montreal, October 18.

Segalowitz, N. & de Almeida, R. G. (2000). Lexical-conceptual representation in bilinguals: semantic field effects in verb categorization. Paper presented at the Second International Conference on the Mental Lexicon. Montreal, October 19.

de Almeida, R. G. & Libben, G. (2000). Resolving morphological ambiguity in sentence context. Poster presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing conference. University of Leiden, The Netherlands, September 20.

de Almeida, R. G., & Libben, G. (2000) The effect of constituent disruption in English compound recognition. 9th International Morphology Meeting, Workshop on Compound Processing. University of Vienna, Austria, February.

McEwen, S., Libben, G., & de Almeida (1999) Do we really access multimorphemic representations during word recognition? Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS) conference. University of Alberta, Edmonton, August.

de Almeida, R. G. (1998) Lexical Concepts do not Decompose: Evidence from Verbs. Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference. Freiburg, Germany, September.

de Almeida, R. G. & Libben, G. (1998) Morphological Decomposition: Effects of Semantic Ambiguity and Affixation. Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference. Freiburg, Germany, September.

de Almeida, R. G. (1998) Causatives and Lexical Atomism. Canadian Linguistics Association Annual Meeting. University of Ottawa, Ottawa, May.

de Almeida, R. G. & Fodor, J. A. (1998) Lexical Concepts in Sentence Comprehension: Evidence for Nondecompositionality. Eleventh Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. New Brunswick, NJ, March.

de Almeida, R. G. & Fodor, J. A. (1996-a). Still Looking for Structural Complexity Effects in Lexical Concepts. In G. W. Cottrell (Ed.), Proceedings of the Eighteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

de Almeida, R. G. & Fodor, J. A. (1996-b) Looking for Structural Complexity Effects in Lexical Concepts. Ninth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. New York, NY, March.

Research in Progress

(For more information, check the Psycholinguistics and Cognition Lab page)

Research has focused on structural (syntactic, morphological) and conceptual properties of verbs in lexical and sentence processing as well as in category-specific semantic deficits. Projects are funded by SSHRC, FQRSC and Concordia research grants. Current projects include research on

category-specific deficits with verb concepts (with Forouzan Mobayyen, Christina Manouilidou [Sussex], George Schwartz [McGill], Vasavan Nair [McGill], et al.) [research with Alzheimer's patients];

the role of verb argument-structure and conceptual representations in sentence processing (with Ioana Constantinescu, graduate student) [research with reading disabled adolescents];

the conceptual representation of causative verbs [follow-up on dissertation work] (with C. Manouilidou, V. Dwivedi [Brock U.], et al.)
the representation and processing of morphologically complex words (with Gary Libben [U. of Alberta], Linnaea Stockall [Concordia], Celso Novaes [Federal University of Rio de Janeiro] et al.);
comprehension of semantically underspecified sentences (with C. Manouilidou, Brendan Gillon [McGill], Gonia Jarema [U. de Montreal], et al.);
processing of verb "middle" constructions (with A. M. Di Sciullo [UQAM], C. Manouilidou, V. Dwivedi)
the language-vision interaction during sentence processing (with Michael von Grunau, Caroline van de Velde, Julia Di Nardo [Concordia], and Cesar Galera [Universidade de São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, Brazil]);

PhD Dissertation

de Almeida, R. G. (1999) The Representation of Lexical Concepts: A Psycholinguistic Inquiry. Rutgers University (Department of Psychology / Center for Cognitive Science) New Brunswick, NJ. (Supervisor: Jerry A. Fodor) [abridged version in .pdf]

Varia

Concordia University Department of Psychology