Amy DiBattista

Amy DiBattista Graduate Student Department of Psychology, 125-NI Northeastern University Boston, MA 02115 (617) 373-3077 (office) (617) 373-8714 (fax) dibattista.a@husky.neu.edu

Advisor

Neal Pearlmutter

Research

I am a fifth-year graduate student working with Professor Neal Pearlmutter in the Sentence Processing Lab. My research focuses on the effects of semantic properties on syntactic planning in sentence production. I am specifically interested in word-order determination and planning at the level of the noun phrase.

I am currently investigating the role of semantic integration—a relatedness relationship between lexical items—in grammatical encoding. These experiments investigate semantic integration’s effects on rates of exchange errors: speech errors in which words or phrases are exchanged (e.g., saying “the letter on the stamp” when “the stamp on the letter” was intended). I am also developing experiments to investigate phrase-internal word-order planning (the planning of the adjective and noun in phrases such as “the red dress”).

In the future, I hope to incorporate my background in speech-language pathology by extending my research to include syntactic processing in people with aphasia.