Shayne Sloggett
Experimental Officer in Psycholinguistics

Profile

Biography

Shayne joined the department in September 2019 as the Experimental Officer in Psycholinguistics. His research interests are sentence processing, syntax, and the interaction of grammatical knowledge and sentence comprehension routines. This research draws on insights from linguistic theory to better inform psycholinguistic models (and vice versa), using a range of methods from formal acceptability rating tasks, to eye-tracking while reading and corpus linguistics.

Career

• Experimental Officer in Psycholinguistics
  University of York (2019-present)

• Postdoctoral Researcher
  Northwestern University (2017-2019)

• PhD in Linguistics
  University of Massachusetts Amherst (2011-2017)

• Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab Manager
  University of Maryland, College Park (2010-2011)

• BA in Linguistics
  University of California, Santa Cruz (2008-2011)

Teaching

Undergraduate

• Advanced Psycholinguistics
• Neurolinguistics

Postgraduate

• Advanced Psycholinguistics
• Experimental Methods in Psycholinguistic Research

Research

Overview

I’m a postdoctoral fellow in linguistics and cognitive science at Northwestern University, recently by way of UMass Amherst. My focus is on psycholinguistics and sentence processing, with a particular interest in syntactic processing and pronominal reference. While at UMass, I collaborated with Drs. Brian Dillon and Lyn Frazier on projects ranging from the processing of filler-gap dependencies, to the resolution of anaphoric reference. At Northwestern, I worked with Dr. Masaya Yoshida on predictive processing in agreement dependencies, and with Dr. Klinton Bicknell on developing a novel technique for analyzing cumulative progression eye-data. Here at York, I will be continuing these projects while also exploring exciting new avenues of research with Drs. Nino Grillo, Sam Hellmuth, Heather Marsden, and Eytan Zweig, among many others of our faculty.

External activities

Invited talks and conferences

Invited talks

• 2018. University of California, Santa Cruz. Processing pressures and locality in English reflexive comprehension. 

• 2018. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Understanding reflexives: combining psycholinguistic and theoretical perspectives.

• 2016. University of California, Santa Cruz. Do comprehenders violate binding theory? depends on your point of view.

Conferences

• 2019. Sloggett, Rysling, & Staub. Linguistic focus as predictive attention allocation. Poster at CUNY 32. Boulder, CO.

• 2019. Choe, Sloggett, Yoshida, & D’Onofrio. Personae in syntactic processing: socially-specified agents bias expectations of verb transitivity. Poster at CUNY 32. Boulder, CO.

• 2019. Orth, Yoshida, & Sloggett. NPI illusions are a problem of quantification. Poster at CUNY 32. Boulder, CO.

• 2018. Sloggett & Dillon. Person blocking in reflexive processing: When “I” matter more than “them”. Talk at CUNY 31. Davis, CA.

• 2017. Sloggett & Dillon. Animacy in reflexive processing: When “it” matters more than verbs. Talk at CUNY 30. Boston, MA.

• 2016. Sloggett & Dillon. When do comprehenders violate binding theory? Depends on your point of view. Talk at AMLaP 22: Bilbao, Spain.

• 2016. Sloggett & Dillon. When errors aren’t: how comprehenders selectively violate binding theory. Talk at NELS 47. Amherst, MA.