The Ohio State
University at Marion
Nikole
Patson-Huffman
Office:
170D Morrill Hall
Phone: (740) 725-6244
Email: Huffman.689@osu.edu
I
am an Assistant Professor at the Marion Campus of The Ohio State University. I
completed my undergraduate work at the University of Michigan-Flint. I earned
my Master’s degree from Michigan State University and earned my Ph.D. in
Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2011. I am looking forward to
returning to the Midwest.
At
The Ohio State University-Marion, I will be teaching General Psychology,
Cognition and Memory, Perception, Language and the Mind, and Language
Development. I also look forward to supervising students’ independent studies
and honors’ theses related to language comprehension.
My
research focuses on adult language comprehension. The act of comprehending a
sentence usually feels effortless and simple. However, it is not uncommon for comprehenders to make mistakes they aren’t aware of. One
common cause of this kind of mistake is that comprehenders
sometimes leave words or even syntactic structures underspecified (e.g.,
Patson, Darowski, Moon, & Ferreira, 2009). For
example, someone who read “this work fills an important gap in the literature”
as indicating that the work is important, would have committed this kind of
error. This interpretation follows from a shallow reading that combines the
related and expected concepts of importance, work, and filling gaps, but fails
to specify the crucial relationship between “important” and “gap”. I am
interested in what factors contribute to when and how often sentence comprehenders leave information underspecified, leading to
these kinds of errors. My work is informed by formal linguistics as well as
cognitive psychology.
My
research has focused on the conceptual representation of plurals. For example,
consider the sentence The cats slept on the rug. When a comprehender
hears this sentence what conceptual representation is built for “cats”? The
plural referent cats could be left underspecified and represented as a single,
non-differentiated group or it could be fully specified and thus represented as
a set of differentiated cats. This question is important because if plurals are
left underspecified, this could have implications for future processing. For
example, if later the individuals in the plural need to be accessed,
comprehension may slow down in order to individuate the entities in the plural,
if it had not been previously done.
Recent Publications
(PDF files are for personal use only. Any
other use is prohibited.)
Patson,
N.D., and Warren, T. (2011). Building complex reference objects from dual sets.
Journal of Memory and Language, 64, 443-459.
Warren,
T., Reichle, E. D., and Patson, N. D. (2011). Lexical
and post-lexical complexity effects on eye movements in reading. Journal of
Eye Movement Research, 4, 1-10.
Patson,
N. D., and Warren, T. (2010 a). Evidence for distributivity
effects in comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory and Cognition, 36, 782-789.
Patson,
N. D., and Warren, T. (2010 b). Eye movements to plausibility violations: Do
theta-assignment and locality influence the speed of semantic integration? Quarterly
Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 1516-1532.
Patson,
N. D., Darowski, E. S., Moon, N., and Ferreira, F.
(2009). Individual differences in garden-path interpretation: Evidence for the
lingering activation of the inappropriate analyses. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35, 280-285.
Patson,
N. D., and Ferreira, F. (2009). Conceptual plural information is used to guide
early parsing decisions: Evidence from garden-path sentences with reciprocal
verbs. Journal of Memory and Language, 60, 464-486.
Ferreira,
F., and Patson, N. D. (2007). The ‘Good Enough’ approach to language
comprehension. Language and Linguistics Compass, 1, 71-83.
Cain, K.,
Patson, N. D., and Andrews, L. (2005). Age- and ability-related differences in
young readers’ use of conjunctions. Journal of Child Language, 32, 877-892.