Adrian Staub

430 Tobin Hall         Department of Psychology         University of Massachusetts         Amherst, MA 01003         (413) 545 - 5925 (office)         (413) 545 - 5952 (lab)         (413) 545 - 0996 (fax)         email: astaub at psych dot umass dot edu         (I'm leaving out @ and dot to foil spammers)

As of Fall 2008, I am an assistant professor in cognitive psychology at the University of Massachusetts.

Most of my work is in psycholinguistics.  My primary area of interest is syntactic parsing, i.e., the process of analyzing the grammatical structure of a sentence as it is heard or read.   In most of my experiments, participants' eye movements are monitored as they read sentences in which syntactic structure has been manipulated.  (You can see the Umass eyetracking lab website here.)

My Ph.D. is also from Umass.  Prior to coming to Umass, I worked on memory for visual scenes and on attentional processes at MIT.  Before that, I received a B.A. in Psychology from Harvard, and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh.

Much of my research has focused on questions about the time-course with which readers and listeners make use of their grammatical knowledge in the process of constructing an initial syntactic analysis of a sentence.  I’m interested in how grammatical constraints interact with probabilistic constraints, and in how the processing of individual words interacts with higher-level processing.  Lately, I've also become interested in the temporal dynamics of the process by which speakers make syntactic decisions in the course of sentence production, and in applying models of response time distributions to psycholinguistic data.

I’m very happy to respond to queries from prospective visitors or grad students.  Please email me!

Here are my recent publications and presentations.  NOTE:  All electronic documents are provided for personal use only.  Downloading a document should be considered a request by you for a single copy.  Do not circulate or disseminate.

The web page for Psych 240 is here.

Journal Articles:

Drieghe, D., Pollatsek, A., Staub, A., & Rayner, K. (in press).  The word grouping hypothesis and eye movements during reading.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Staub, A., & Clifton, C., Jr. (in press).  Processing effects of an indeterminate future:  Evidence from self-paced reading.  University of Massachusetts Occasional Papers in Linguistics. 

Staub, A., Rayner, K., Pollatsek, A., Hyönä, J., & Majewski, H.  (2007).  The time course of plausibility effects on eye movements in reading: Evidence from noun-noun compounds.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 1162-1169.

Staub, A.  (2007).  The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 33, 550-569.

Staub, A.  (2007).  The return of the repressed: Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis.  Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 299-323.

Staub, A., & Clifton, C., Jr.  (2006).  Syntactic prediction in language comprehension: Evidence from either…or.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 32, 425-436. 

Staub, A., Clifton, C., Jr., & Frazier, L.  (2006).  Heavy NP shift is the parser's last resort: Evidence from eye movements.  Journal of Memory and Language, 54, 389-406.

Potter, M.  C., Staub, A., & O'Connor, D.  H.  (2004).  Conceptual representation of glimpsed pictures.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 30: 478-489

Potter, M.  C., Staub, A., & O'Connor, D.  H.  (2002).  The time course of competition for attention: Attention is initially labile.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 28: 1149-1162.

Potter, M.  C., Staub, A., Rado, J., & O'Connor, D.  H.  (2002).  Recognition memory for briefly-presented pictures: The time course of rapid forgetting.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 28: 1163-1175.

Book Chapters and Reviews:

Clifton, C., Jr., & Staub, A. (2008).  Parallelism and competition in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Language and Linguistics Compass, 2, 234-250.

Staub, A., & Rayner, K.  (2007).  Eye movements and on-line comprehension processes.  In: G. Gaskell (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics (pp. 327-342). Oxford, UK:  Oxford University Press.

Clifton, C., Jr., Staub, A., & Rayner, K.  (2007).  Eye movements in reading words and sentences.  In: R. van Gompel (Ed.), Eye movements: A window on mind and brain (pp.  341-372).  Amsterdam: Elsevier. 

Talks:

Staub, A. (2008, May).  On the interaction of lexical and syntactic processing:  Eye movement evidence.  Invited Talk, Festschrift in honor of Charles Clifton, Royal Society of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, Scotland.

Staub, A., & Clifton, C., Jr. (2007, August).  Building syntactic structure takes time:  Experimental evidence and theoretical implications for models of eye movement control in reading.  14^th European Conference on Eye Movements, Potsdam, Germany.

Clifton, C., Jr., & Staub, A.  (2007, January).  Anticipation in parsing.  Invited talk, Biological and Psychological Foundations of Language: Symposium in Honor of Marica de Vincenzi.  Università degli Studi “Gabriele d'Annunzio” di Chieti–Pescara, Italy.

Staub, A.  (2006, November).  Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis: Evidence from eye movements.  Invited talk, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig , Germany.

Staub, A.  (2006, November).  The parser doesn't ignore intransitivity, after all: Evidence from eye movements.  Invited talk, Department of Germanic Language and Linguistics, Phillips University Marburg, Marburg , Germany.

Staub, A.  and Clifton C., Jr.  (2006, March) Effects of a word's status as a predictable phrasal head on lexical decision and eye movements.  19th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY.

Staub, A., & Clifton C., Jr.  (2005, August).  Effects of syntactic category predictability on eye movements during reading.  13^th European Conference on Eye Movements, Bern , Switzerland.

Clifton , C., Jr., & Staub, A.  (2005, August).  Syntactic prediction.  Invited talk, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig , Germany.

Posters:

Staub, A. (2007, November)  Number attraction and the mismatch asymmetry: Reaction time evidence for competition.  Poster presented at 48^th annual meeting of the Psychonomics Society, Long Beach, CA.

Staub, A.  (2007, March).  Intransitivity does prevent direct object misanalysis: Eye movement evidence.  Poster presented at the 20^th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, San Diego, CA.

Staub, A, Rayner, K., Pollatsek, S., Hyönä, J., & Majewki, H.  (2007, March).  The effect of plausibility on eye movements in reading: Does number matter? Poster presented at the 20^th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, San Diego, CA.

Staub, A., & Clifton C., Jr.  (2005, November).  Arriving and struggling the veterinarian: Lexical guidance in parsing, revisited.  Poster presented at Psychonomics Society, Toronto , Canada.

Staub, A., Clifton, C., Jr., & Frazier, L.  (2005, April).  Subcategorization possibilities trigger syntactic expectations: Evidence from the processing of heavy NP shift.  Poster presented at the 18^th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Tucson, AZ.