Stephani Foraker's Home Page

teaching research publications education links

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Description: Description: Description: Description: Steph_StarvedRock_06_web Stephani Foraker

Assistant Professor

forakesm AT buffalostate.edu

office 716.878.6027

Department of Psychology

Buffalo State College

1300 Elmwood Ave.

Classroom Bldg A309

Buffalo, NY 14222

teaching

Buffalo State: Angel

Cognitive Psychology

Psycholinguistics

Research Methods in Psychology

Sensation & Perception

Long-term Memory (Senior Seminar in Psychology)

The Psychological Power of Language

Instructor:

Research Methods, University of Chicago, 2008

Experimental Psychology, National-Louis University, 2008

Cognitive Development, National-Louis University, 2007

Psychology of Language, University of Chicago, 2004

Cognition, New York University, 2003, 2004

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

- Sydney J. Harris

research

I am a cognitive psychologist, specializing in studying psycholinguistics and memory. I am interested in how we communicate with each other, asking how our voice, our body, and different aspects of language affect how easily we can understand or remember something.

One of my research concentrations is based on the point of view that memory and cognitive processes play a significant role in language processing. Humans seem to learn and use language effortlessly, but understanding and producing language are complex processes that involve the interaction of domain-general and language-specific aspects at many different levels. At present, my research examines the sentence and discourse levels of analysis. Some of the questions I’m working on are:

· When and how do working memory and attention affect our understanding of words that need to be linked, but are far apart from each other (e.g., anaphor-antecedent relations)?

· When you’re trying to figure out what a pronoun means, like “she,” what kinds of information lead to interference?

· Are word meanings stored and retrieved from memory, or are they constructed “on the fly” from some core meaning?

· How does emphasizing something with your voice affect what your conversation partner will understand and remember?

A second, related branch of my research looks at the role of gestures in memory and communication.

· What aspects of gestures provide information about new vs. old entities in a discourse?

· To what extent are listener-viewers sensitive to the information that speakers provide in gesture? Under what circumstances do they use it?

· Does using gestures to encode and learn new information always help you, or can it hurt you?

· How is gestured information represented in the mind/brain of a producer? For example, spatially, propositionally, kinesically? Are the same or different kinds of representations used by a comprehender?

To address these questions, my lab uses several behavioral techniques including accuracy and response/reaction times, speed-accuracy tradeoff modeling, eye-tracking measures (Eyelink 1000), and annotation and analysis of speech and gesture recordings (audio, video).

collaborators

Brian McElree Gregory Murphy Howard Nusbaum UB Psycholinguistics Group

If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail.

- Abraham Maslow

publications & presentations

publications

Foraker, S. & McElree, B. (2011). Comprehension of linguistic dependencies: Speed-accuracy tradeoff evidence for direct-access retrieval from memory. Language and Linguistics Compass, 5(11), 764-783. doi: 10.1111/j.1749-818x.2011.00313.x [pdf available upon request]

Foraker, S. (2011). Gesture and discourse: How we use our hands to introduce and refer back. In G. Stam, M. Ishino, & R. Ashley (Eds.), Integrating Gestures. New York, NY: John Benjamins. [pdf available upon request]

Nusbaum H., Foraker, S., & Fenn, K. (2010). Working memory and language processing. In P. C. Hogan (Ed.), The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the Language Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

Foraker, S., Regier, T., Khetarpal, N., Perfors, A., & Tenenbaum, J. (2009). Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric “one.” Cognitive Science, 33, 287-300. doi: 10.1111/j.1551-6709.2009.01014.x [pdf]

Foraker, S., & McElree, B. (2007). The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Active versus passive representations. Journal of Memory and Language, 56, 357-383. [pdf]

Foraker, S. (2004). The mechanisms involved in the prominence of referent representations during pronoun coreference. ProQuest Dissertations.

Foraker, S. (2003). The processing of logophoric reflexives shows discourse and locality constraints. Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society: Parasessions, 2003. [pdf]

McElree, B., Foraker, S., & Dyer, L. (2003). Memory structures that subserve sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 67-91. [pdf]

* denotes an undergraduate student co-author

spoken presentations

Foraker, S., & *Delo, M. (2012, March). Talk to the hand: Gestures aid in comprehension of ambiguous pronouns. Talk to be presented at the Eastern Psychological conference, Pittsburgh, PA.

Foraker, S., & *Ostrov, M. (2011, March). When words are not enough: Does gesturing facilitate learning more than imagery? Talk presented at the Eastern Psychological Association conference, Cambridge, MA.

Foraker, S., & *Rivers, M. V. (2010, July). Students reflect level of understanding through non-verbal backchanneling. Talk presented at the 4^th Conference of the International Society for Gesture Studies, Frankfurt (Oder), Germany.

Foraker, S. (2008, May). Memory search in language comprehension: Semantic and grammatical constraints on pronoun interpretation. Talk presented at the 80^th Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, IL.

Foraker, S., Regier, T., Khetarpal, N., Perfors, A., & Tenenbaum, J. (2007, August). Indirect evidence and the poverty of the stimulus: The case of anaphoric one. Talk presented at the 20th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Nashville, TN.

Foraker, S., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2007, June). Gesture and discourse: How we use our hands to refer back. Talk presented at the 3rd International Society for Gesture Studies Conference: Integrating Gestures, Chicago, IL.

Foraker, S., Nusbaum, H., & *Schoeneman, S. (2007, May). Re-accessing representations: Prominent concepts show greater specificity of meaning. Talk presented at the Midwestern Psychological Association Conference, Chicago, IL.

Foraker, S., Nusbaum, H., & *Schoeneman, S. (2007, March). Re-accessing representations: Specificity of meaning for prominent and non-prominent concepts. Talk presented at the CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, La Jolla, CA.

Foraker, S. (2003, April). The processing of logophoric reflexives shows discourse and locality constraints. Talk presented at the Chicago Linguistic Society Conference, Chicago, IL.

McElree, B. & Foraker, S. (2000, September). Co-occurrence frequency and plausibility constraints do not directly affect the time-course of parsing operations. Talk presented at the Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference, Leiden, The Netherlands.

posters

Foraker, S. (2011, November). Intentional gesturing during encoding enhances retrieval. 52^nd annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Seattle, WA. [pdf]

*Rivers, M. V., & Foraker, S. (2010, March). Do students reflect their level of understanding through non-verbal behaviors? Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, Brooklyn, NY. [pdf]

Foraker, S., & Murphy, G. L. (2009, March). Polysemy in sentence comprehension: Effects of meaning dominance. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Davis, CA. [pdf]

Foraker, S. & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2007, August). Gesture and discourse: How we use our hands to refer back. The 20^th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Nashville, TN.

Foraker, S. (2007, March). Explicit versus implicit prosody: Effects on pronoun interpretation. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, La Jolla, CA.

Foraker, S. & McElree, B. (2006, March). The role of prominence in pronoun resolution: Availability versus accessibility. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, New York, USA.

Foraker, S., & McElree, B. (2005, March). On the memory structures underlying prominence during coreference resolution. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Tucson, AZ.

Bencini, G., McElree, B., & Foraker, S. (2004, September). The effect of animacy on the time course of filler-gap resolution in Wh- Questions. Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference, Aix, France.

Foraker, S. (2004, March). Syntactic focus and first-mention status affect pronoun coreference. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, College Park, MD.

Foraker, S. & McElree, B. (2001, March). The effects of co-occurrence frequency on the time-course of parsing operations. CUNY Sentence Processing Conference, Philadelphia, PA.