Daphna Heller

Toronto Language Processing Lab

Our lab investigates the cognitive mechanisms that underlie people's ability to produce and understand language. We focus on research questions at the level of sentences, examining their meaning and structure, and how linguistic information is integrated with background information about other participants in the conversation and the physical world (technically, semantics, syntax and pragmatics). In many of our experiments, participants engage in game-like tasks with a partner, and we measure their linguistic behaviour as well as their eye movements.

The lab is located in Sid Smith 569A (ground floor, purple section). If you would like to participate in a study, email daphna[.]heller[@]utoronto[.]ca.

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Lab Members

Daphna Heller

Principle Investigator

Becky Tollen

PhD student

Research Interests: My research focuses on sentence processing in understudied languages; in particular, how case marking and verb transitivity may affect processing of the core arguments of a sentence. I have recently returned from a fieldwork trip to Niue, where I conducted an experimental study on the Niuean language.

Frederick Gietz

PhD student

Research Interests: Expermental semantics and pragmatics.

Kelly-Ann Blake

Masters student

Research Interests: Prediction in conversation, the influences involve in perspective-taking during language production, and the encoding of semantic information.

Megan Parker

Masters student

Research Interests: Psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, lexical access, semantics.

Undergraduates

Bahareh Doroudiani

Jida Jaffan

Kim Mina