Mike Amato

618 Psychology Bldg University of Wisconsin-Madison Dept of Psychology (WJ Brogden Hall) 1202 West Johnson Street Madison, WI 53706-1696 Phone: (608) 262-1897 Fax: (608) 262-4029

Graduate Student

BA in Linguistics, BA in Sociology, 2004, Northeastern University, Boston, MA

Research Statement:

I am a fourth year student in the cognitive area group, studying how humans put words together to understand meaning from language. In particular I am interested in the way context affects the semantic and syntactic interpretation of a word. Despite the fact that most sentences we hear we've never heard before, we are able to understand them seemingly effortlessly by making generalizations based on similarity to past experiences. Generalizations are made at many grains in language, from the very fine (e.g. cats occur in many of the same contexts as dogs) to the very coarse (e.g. words denoting events are often followed by words denoting entities). Such generalizations occur in many domains beyond language; understanding when and how people make them sheds light on the way we understand the world.

Towards that end my current research focuses on the learning of statistical relationships, and how that knowledge might be used to generalize to novel situations. To investigate acquisition, I have been using an artificial language paradigm to investigate people's ability to learn conditional probabilties among elements and then use those probabilities to guide their linguistic behavior. Another line of research investigates comprehension of English sentences and phrases: how the difficulty with which a word is integrated into a context can be predicted based on specific and generalized experience.

Presentations & Posters

Amato, M. S., Willits, J. A., MacDonald, M. C., & Sussman, R. S. (2009). Learning Language Statistics when World Statistics are Equal. Poster presented at Psychonomics Society Annual Meeting.

Amato, M. S., Willits, J. A., and MacDonald, M. C. (2009). Verb aspect and argument activation: World vs. Word Knowledge. Talk presented at CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.

Amato, M. S., and MacDonald, M. C. (2008). The Influence of Second-Order, Non-Adjacent Constraints on Reading Times in an Artificial Language Paradigm. Poster presented at CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.

Willits, J. A., Sussman, R. S., & Amato, M. S. (2008). Event Knowledge vs. Verb Knowledge. Cognitive Science Society.

Environmental Sustainability

In addition to my interest in the way humans understand and communicate about their experiences in the world, I am also interested in the health of the world itself. I work with REthink Wisconsin and We Conserve to promote sustainable thinking on campus and lessen the University's environmental impact.

Harrod, J., & Amato, M. S. (2009). Cleaning Up Our Trash: Improving Recycling at UW-Madison by Reducing Recyclables in the Trash Stream. We Conserve and REthink Wisconsin.