Michael Tanenhaus

Michael Tanenhaus

Michael K. Tanenhaus (born before 1973) is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist and linguist.

Tanenhaus studied psychology at the University of Iowa with a bachelor's degree in 1973 (Speech and Hearing Science) and at Columbia University with a master's degree in 1975 and a doctorate in 1978.

He became Assistant Professor in 1977 and Associate Professor at Wayne State University in 1981 and Associate Professor in 1983 and Professor of Psychology at the University of Rochester in 1987 . Since 1996 he has also been Professor of Linguistics there and since 1995 in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, from 2009 as Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor . From 1996 to 1999 and 2003 to 2009 he was director of the University's Center for Language Science.

He has also been a professor at Nanjing Normal University since 2016 .

It deals with the investigation of the real-time processing of speech during listening and reading and in the visual environment (e.g. when the experimenter gives the test subject verbal instructions in a restricted, controlled visual environment). In the experiment, he systematically used eye tracking to determine what the test subject was unconsciously concentrating on. In experiments in which the experimenter gives ambiguous linguistic instructions, in each case in visual scenes that resolve the ambiguity or not, he found evidence of non-modular processing in the brain (contrary to the theories of his colleague Jerry Fodor at Rutgers University) and that language understanding is supported by visual information and by non-linguistic additional information that the test subject extracts from visual perception.

He also explored real-time understanding of spoken language and how it is represented and coordinated between various linguistic and conceptual subsystems.

He is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society , the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2006), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2011). In 2018 he received the David E. Rumelhart Prize . He is one of the highly cited cognitive scientists.

Fonts (selection)

• as editor with Steven L. Small, Garrison W. Cottrell: Lexical Ambiguity Resolution. Perspective from Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology, and Artificial Intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann, San Mateo CA 1988, ISBN 0-934613-50-8 .
• as editor with John C. Trueswell: Approaches to Studying World-Situated Language Use. Bridging the Language-as-Product and Language-as-Action Traditions. MIT Press, Cambridge MA et al. 2005, ISBN 0-262-20149-6 .

Essays:

• with Mark S. Seidenberg, James M. Leiman, Marie Bienkowski: Automatic access of the meanings of ambiguous words in context: Some limitations of knowledge-based processing. In: Cognitive Psychology. Volume 14, Number 4, 1982, pp. 489-537, doi : 10.1016 / 0010-0285 (82) 90017-2 .
• with Mark S. Seidenberg, Gloria S. Waters, Marcia A. Barnes: When does irregular spelling or pronunciation influence word recognition? In: Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior. Volume 23, Number 3, 1984, pp. 383-404, doi : 10.1016 / S0022-5371 (84) 90270-6 .
• with John C. Trueswell, Christopher Kello: Verb-specific constraints in sentence processing: separating effects of lexical preference from garden-paths. In: Journal of Experimental Psychology. Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Volume 19, Number 3, 1993, pp. 528-553, doi : 10.1037 / 0278-7393.19.3.528 .
• with John C. Trueswell: Toward a lexicalist framework for constraint-based syntactic ambiguity resolution. In: Charles Clifton Jr., Lyn Frazier, Keith Rayner (Eds.): Perspectives in Sentence Processing. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Hillsdale NJ 1994, ISBN 0-8058-1582-1 , pp. 155-179.
• with John C. Trueswell, Susan M. Garnsey: Semantic influences on parsing: Use of thematic role information in syntactic ambiguity Resolution. In: Journal of Memory and Language. Volume 33, Number 3, 1994, pp. 285-318, doi : 10.1006 / jmla.1994.1014 .
• with Kathleen M. Eberhard, Michael J. Spivey-Knowlton, Julie C. Sedivy: Eye movements as a window into real-time spoken language comprehension in natural contexts. In: Journal of Psycholinguistic Research. Volume 24, Number 6, 1995, pp. 409-436, doi : 10.1007 / BF02143160 .
• with Michael J. Spivey-Knowlton, Kathleen M. Eberhard, Julie C. Sedivy: Integration of Visual and Linguistic Information in Spoken Language Comprehension. In: Science . Volume 268, number 5217, 1995, pp. 1632-1634, doi : 10.1126 / science.7777863 .
• with Paul D. Allopenna, James S. Magnuson: Tracking the time course of spoken word recognition using eye movements: Evidence for continuous mapping models. In: Journal of Memory and Language. Volume 38, Number 4, 1998, pp. 419-439, doi : 10.1006 / jmla.1997.2558 .
• with Ken McRae, Michael J. Spivey-Knowlton: Modeling the influence of thematic fit (and other constraints) in on-line sentence comprehension. In: Journal of Memory and Language. Volume 38, Number 3, 1998, pp. 283-312, doi : 10.1006 / jmla.1997.2543 .

Web links

• Homepage

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Rumelhart Prize for Tanenhaus ( Memento of the original from August 20, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.