About Me

I began my linguistics career at Concordia as un undergrad in the mid-ninetees, so it's great fun to be back home after many years in such exotic, far flung locals as New England and Mid-State Michigan. I did my PhD at MIT, where in addition to getting a fantastic theoretical linguistics education, I first discovered that it was actually possible to research the neural basis of the human linguistic capacity, and spent several years doing so with my adviser, Alec Marantz. I then spent two years as a post-doc at MSU, where I did *not* learn to love college football, but where I did learn an enormous amount about psycholinguistics and the practice of experimental science from my supervisor Fernanda Ferreira. In the summer of 2006, I came home to Montreal, where I've been conducting research in Roberto de Almeida's lab and teaching in the Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics ever since. This summer, I'll be teaching two courses at the EGG school in Poznan, Poland.

When I'm not attempting to unravel the mysteries of human cognition, I can also be found growing vegetables, making clothes and figuring out how to live a life with less waste and more fun. I also take pictures.

About My Research

My work focuses on the earliest stages of linguistic information extraction and processing involved in the retrieval of individual words and parts of words, and in the combination of those pieces to form complex utterances. Specifically, that means my work deals with questions such as how we store and process morphological constituents, and what use we make of morphological information in syntactic processing and also with how lexical semantic information is extracted and integrated into compositional semantic interpretations.

One tool I use frequently to address these questions is magnetoencephalography (MEG), which has the best combination of spatial and temporal resolution of all existing cognitive neuroscience tools. MEG measures stimulus evoked neural responses with millisecond resolution. This sensitivity allows us to separate early and later stages of processing, providing distinct measures of early and late facilitations and delays in neural computation that may cancel out and lead to null reaction time differences in experimental tasks. [what is MEG?]

Another tool I use in my research is eyetracking devices that record the eye movements we make when reading words and sentences or when interpreting auditory linguistic utterances with respect to the visual environment. Like evoked neuromagnetic activation, eye movements are very rapid and unconscious, allowing us to track the real time processes involved in language comprehension.

I've put together a page listing all the other tools and resources (nearly all free) I find useful in designing, running and analysing experiments and in disseminating results, in the hope it will be useful to other researchers. Let me know if there's a great application or website I don't know about, but should.

Teaching

Winter 2009

• LING353 - Psycholinguistics

Winter 2008

• LING353 - Psycholinguistics - see Moodle for web resources
• LING398P - Lexical Categories
• LING425 - Language Acquisition and Universal Grammar - see Moodle for web resources

Fall 2007

• LING380 - Morphology
• LING398Q - Neurolinguistics
• LING415 - Advanced Syntax

Winter 2007

• LING353 - Psycholinguistics. Concordia University.

Fall 2005

• PSY493(W)-Introduction to Psycholinguistics. Michigan State University.

Guest Lectures

• Nov. 2006. Guest Lecture in LING222-Language and Mind: The Chomskyan Program. Concordia University.
• Sept. 2006. Guest Lecture in PSYC340-Psychology of Language. McGill University. [slides]
• Spring 2006. Guest Lecture in LIN455-Neurolinguistics. Michigan State University. [slides]
• Spring 2005. Guest Lecture in LIN455-Neurolinguistics. Michigan State University.

Publications & Manuscripts

2009

• Stockall, L. de Almeida, R., & von Grunau, M. (in preparation) Compound Constituency Detection by the Right and Left Fusiform Gyrus.
• Husband, E.M., Stockall, L. & Beretta, A. (submitted) VP-Internal Event Composition: Processing Evidence for Phrase-Level Event Interpretation. 27pgs
• Husband, E.M., Stockall, L. & Beretta, A. (submitted) The Online Composition of Events.
• Pollatsek, A., Drieghe, D., Stockall, L. & de Almeida, R. (submitted) The Interpretation of Ambiguous Trimorphemic Words in Sentence Context. 24pgs.

2006

• Stockall, L. & Marantz, A. A single route, full decomposition model of morphological complexity: MEG evidence. The Mental Lexicon.1:1, 85-123. [pdf]

2004

• Stockall, L. Magnetoencephalographic investigations of morphological identity and irregularity. PhD thesis. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. [pdf]
• Stockall, L. Stringfellow, A. & Marantz, A. The precise timecourse of lexical activation: MEG measurements of the effects of frequency, probability and density in lexical decision. Brain and Language. 90:1-3, 88-94. [pdf]

Recent Presentations

• 2009, February. What's in a Word? How and When and Where we Process Morphological Constituents. Talk given at the University of Ottawa.
• 2008, October. Building Events: Online Investigations of Verbal and Nominal Contributions to Aktionsart. Poster presented at Verb Concepts Workshop, Montreal.
• 2008, April. with Roberto de Almeida and Michael von Grunau Early Compound Constituent Processing by Right and Left Fusiform Gyrus. Poster given at The Cognitive Neuroscience Societ Annual Meeting. San Francisco, CA.
• 2008, March. with E. Matthew Husband and Alan Beretta. The semantics and pragmatics of repeated event interpretations: eye movement investigations.. Poster given at CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, 2008. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
• 2008, February. Building Aspectual Interpretations. Talk given at The Polinsky Lab, Harvard University.
• 2007, November. Building events: how the syntax and semantics of termination are computed in real time" Talk given to the Concordia Linguistics Student's Association Collquia Series [slides:pdf]
• 2006, September. with E. Matthew Husband and Alan Beretta. Aspectual Computation: Evidence for Immediate Commitment. Talk given at AMLaP, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
• 2006, April. with E.Matthew Husband, Janet Dean Fodor and Fernanda Ferreira. Very Early Grammatical Error Detection: Evidence from Single Trial MEG Analysis. Poster presented at Cognitive Neuroscience Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA.
• 2006, March. with E. Matthew Husband and Alan Beretta. Aspectual Computation: A Processing Perspective. Talk given at M.S.U. Linguistics Colloquium.
• 2006, January. MEG Evidence for Morphological Decomposition. Invited talk given at University of Kansas, Department of Linguistics.
• 2006,January. Behavioral and neural investigations of the time course of morphological processing. Talk given at L.S.A. Annual Meeting. Albuquerque, NM.
• 2005, September. Decomposing Morphological Decomposition. Invited talk given at Concordia University, Department of Psychology.
• 2005, April. Subsyntactic composition: MEG investigations of morphological decomposition. Poster presented at CUNY 2005, Tuscon, Arizona.

Free tools I use to:

design materials

• N-Watch: Colin Davis' program computes lexical neighbourhood statistics and many other lexical properties. Invaluable for creating well-controlled materials. Only works on Windows.
• VIEW (Variation in English Words and Phrases):  Mark Davies' handy web interface that makes searching the British National Corpus easy
• ARC Nonword Database: Generates nonword materials that conform to a wide choice of properties 
• The Linguist's Search Engine: A tool written by Philip Resnik and Aaron Elkiss "that makes it possible to retrieve naturally occurring sentences from the World Wide Web on the basis of lexical content and syntactic structure."
• Speech and Hearing Lab Neighborhood Database: From Washington University in St. Louis.
• The Word Frequency Lists: Lists of very frequent words in a variety of corpora compiled by Rob Waring.
• The Phonotactic Probability Calculator: by Mike Vitevitch at the University of Kansas.
• Semantic Space Model Demo: A tool for calculating the number of semantic neighbors a word has as deteremined by the frequency distributions of words occuring in the environment of the target word in large corpora. By Scott MacDonald.
• The MRC Psycholinguistic Database: Great tool for either generating or rating stimulus items based on up to 25 different properties with any of dozens of restrictions.
• GSearch: A corpus search tool kit designed to extract sentences from online corpora that have not been tagged. Developed at the University of Edinburgh.
• The LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) interface tool: Hosted at UC Boulder, this tool provides an easy interface to doing LSA.
• The English Lexicon Project: The English Lexicon Project (supported by the National Science Foundation) affords access to a large set of lexical characteristics, along with behavioral data from visual lexical decision and naming studies of 40,481 words and 40,481 nonwords.
• Lexique: Developed by Boris New and Christophe Pallier, Lexique is a database and a search tool for norming French stimuli.

run experiments

• DMDX: experiment running software written by Jonathon Foster. DMDX has extremely reliable timing control, making it the best software available for priming experiments, where stimulus duration and ISI are of the utmost importance.  Only runs on Windows.
• Psyscope X: the OSX compatible version of Psyscope, a software package designed for running psychology experiments by Jonathan Cohen, Matthew Flatt, Brian MacWhinney and Jefferson Provost at Carnegie Melon. The GU interface takes a bit of work to master, but it's pretty flexible and reliable.
• WebExp.2: software written at The University of Edinburgh to run experiments over the internet. Allows the collection of timing data as well as survey/norming type data.

analyse data

• R: command-line based statistical analysis package. A good way to be 100% certain you know exactly how your analyses are calculated. Shravan Vasishth's introductory stats textbook The foundations of statistics: A simulation-based approach uses R to illustrate the relevant concepts and analysis options, so it's a great way to learn R.

and write and collaborate to report results

• LaTeX: For document preparation. Especially useful for linguists as it allows tree drawing, ipa fonts, semantic denotation writing, autosegmental phonological representations, perfectly aligned glosses, etc without all the fuss and bother and ugliness of Word. Essex University's Latex4Linguists page is a great resource for getting started and finding the right packages
• Google Documents: A great way to collaborate on projects. I use the spreadsheet app to organize subject recruitment, scheduling and running, and the document app for everything from planning classes, to maintaining a tech report on an experiment in progress to collaborating on the final write up. It's great for grading papers too. Students can just share the document with me, and then access my comments at any time - no attachments required.

Last updated March 30, 2009