Jelena Mirković 
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Department of Psychology
University of York
York, YO10 5DD
UK
E-Mail:
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Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Psychology, University of York
Ph.D, Psychology, 2005, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Research Statement:
A major topic of my research is how people comprehend and produce aspects of language referred to as grammar or syntax.
Specifically, by combining computational modeling and behavioral studies,
I am interested in exploring the extent to which the processing of grammar/syntax arises from
the interaction of semantic and phonological properties of words.
With its rich inflectional morphology my native language,
Serbian,
happens to provide many opportunities to explore the questions
I'm interested in. Serbian nouns, for example, are coded for gender, case, and number.
In collaboration with Mark Seidenberg
and Marc Joanisse we have addressed the question of
how people use and represent these features.
We have constructed a PDP network that learned to produce 3000+ Serbian nouns.
In addition, by comparing the model to how people perform a similar task we have established
that the network and native Serbian speakers are sensitive to similar factors,
e.g. type/token frequency, neighborhood size.
Using a similar model we have also investigated how grammatical gender can arise from morphophonological and
semantic regularities found in nouns of different genders.
In a related project we have examined the process of agreement production from a similar theoretical perspective.
In English, for example, in the sentence Birds fly the verb (fly) must agree in
number with the subject of the sentence (birds).
The constrain satisfaction approach suggests that subject-verb agreement results
from the interaction of multiple probabilistic constraints,
including semantic and morphophonological properties of words.
In collaboration with Maryellen MacDonald,
we have investigated these claims in a Serbian construction where both singular and plural verb forms
are grammatical, e.g. Five cows run/runs.
The results indicate that the choice of the verb form (runs, run) is modulated
by semantic properties of noun and verb phrases, as well as distributional factors
(e.g. co-occurrence of certain noun forms with singular verb forms).
These findings are contradictory to the predictions of the standard model of production,
which suggests that agreement is a purely syntactic process.
Background:
I received a BA in Psychology from the
Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro.
I spent most of my undergrad studies in the Laboratory for Experimental Psychology,
where I worked on adult processing of noun morphology with Dr. Aleksandar Kostić,
as well as on the construction of the electronic version of the
Corpus of Serbian language.
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