Dr. Roger van Gompel

Senior Lecturer

Contact Details:
Telephone: (+44)(1382) 388117
Email: Roger van Gompel

Postal Address:
School of Psychology
The University of Dundee
Dundee
DD1 4HN
Scotland, UK

Research Grouping

Language, Cognition and Perception

Research Interests

My research is aimed at understanding how people comprehend and produce language. An important part of my research involves the investigation of how people process the syntactic structure of sentences (e.g., Van Gompel & Pickering, 2007). Perhaps surprisingly, our research (Van Gompel, Pickering, & Traxler, 2001; Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, & Liversedge, 2005) suggests that sentences that are syntactically ambiguous are often easier to read than sentences that are disambiguated. This provides evidence against the commonly held view that different syntactic analyses of an ambiguous structure compete. Instead, the results suggest that difficulty is due to structural reanalysis.

In other research, we have investigated how the processing of sentences is affected by recent exposure to sentences with a very similar structure, a phenomenon often referred to as structural priming (Arai, Van Gompel, & Scheepers, 2007; Carminati, Van Gompel, Scheepers, & Arai, 2008). It appears that structural priming in language comprehension occurs with the same structures as in language production, but interestingly, priming effects in comprehension are much more lexically driven. In research with Leila Kantola (Kantola & Van Gompel, 2011), we have also used structural priming to investigate the syntactic representations of bilinguals: Our results show that structures that exist in two different languages have one single mental representation.

Another important part of my research is concerned with how people comprehend anaphoric expressions (e.g., Järvikivi, Van Gompel, Hyönä, & Bertram, 2005; Van Gompel & Majid, 2004) and produce them. In collaboration with Kumiko Fukumura, we have recently investigated when people produce either a pronoun or a repeated name or noun phrase to refer back to an earlier introduced discourse entity. Our results show that the choice for a particular anaphoric expression is driven by, amongst others, the similarity of a discourse entity to other entities (Fukumura & Van Gompel, in press; Fukumura, Van Gompel, Harley, & Pickering, in press) and syntactic factors, but interestingly, not by the likelihood that people refer to an entity (Fukumura & Van Gompel, 2010). I am currently also collaborating with computational linguists to test the psychological plausibility of computational models of reference, and we have edited a special issue of the journal TopiCS in Cognitive Science on this issue (Van Deemter, Gatt, Van Gompel, & Krahmer, in press).

I am keen to supervise undergraduate and postgraduate students interested in language production or comprehension.

Research Funding

2006-2009 Sentence priming in comprehension: Effects of recent linguistic exposure. ESRC, £161,315.

2005-2006 Pronoun resolution: Competition or race? The British Academy, £6536.

2004 The effect of readers’ task and goal on syntactic ambiguity resolution. The British Academy. £4876.

2002-2003 Understanding pronouns in Finnish. Leverhulme Trust, £25,475.

2003 Investigating the time course of anaphoric processing. The British Academy. £4104

2000-2001 Investigating current sentence processing theories: An eye-tracking study. ESRC, £41069. (With Martin Pickering, University of Edinburgh)

Publications


Links	Publications
	Van Deemter, K., Gatt, A., Van Gompel, R.P.G., & Krahmer, E. (in press). Towards a computational psycholinguistics of reference production. Special issue of TopiCS in Cognitive Science.
	Van Deemter, K., Gatt, A., Van Gompel, R.P.G., & Krahmer, E. (in press). Towards a computational psycholinguistics of reference production. TopiCS in Cognitive Science.
	Fukumura, K., Van Gompel, R.P.G., Harley, T., & Pickering, M.J. (in press). How does similarity-based interference affect the choice of referring expression? Journal of Memory and Language
	Fukumura, K., & Van Gompel, R.P.G. (in press). The effect of animacy on the choice of referring expression. Language and Cognitive Processes.
	Kantola, L. & Van Gompel, R.P.G. (2011). Between- and within-language priming is the same: Evidence for shared bilingual representations. Memory & Cognition, 39, 276-290.
	Fukumura, K., Van Gompel, R.P.G., & Pickering, M. J. (2010). The use of visual context during the production of referring expressions. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 63, 1700-1715.
	Pyykönen, P., Hyönä, J., & Van Gompel, R.P.G. (2010). Activating gender stereotypes during online spoken language comprehension: Evidence from visual world eye-tracking. Experimental Psychology, 57, 126-133.
	Fukumura, K., & Van Gompel, R.P.G. (2010). Choosing anaphoric expressions: Do people take into account likelihood of reference? Journal of Memory and Language, 62, 52-66.
	Carminati, M.N., Van Gompel, R.P.G., Scheepers, C., & Arai, M. (2008). Syntactic priming in comprehension: The role of argument order and animacy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 34, 1098-1110.
	Arai, M., Van Gompel, R.P.G., &a,p; Scheepers, C. (2007). Priming ditransitive structures in comprehension. Cognitive Psychology, 54, 218-250.
	Pickering, M.J., & Van Gompel, R.P.G. (2007). Syntactic parsing. In M.J. Traxler & M.A. Gernsbacher (Eds.), The handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 455-503). San Diego CA: Elsevier.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., & Pickering, M.J. (2007). Syntactic parsing. In G. Gaskell (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of psycholinguistics (pp. 289-307). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., Fischer, M.H., Murray, W.S., & Hill, R.L. (2007). Eye movements: A window on mind and brain. Oxford: Elsevier.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., Fischer, M.H., Murray, W.S., & Hill, R.L. (2007). Eye movement research: An overview of current and past developments. In R.P.G. van Gompel, M.H. Fischer, W.S. Murray, & R.L. Hill (Eds.) Eye movements: A window on mind and brain (pp. 1-28). Oxford: Elsevier.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G. (2006). Sentence processing. In K. Brown et al. (Eds.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd edition). Oxford: Elsevier.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., Pickering, M.J., Pearson, J., & Jacob, G. (2006). The activation of inappropriate analyses in garden-path sentences: Evidence from structural priming. Journal of Memory and Language, 55, 335-362.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., Pickering, M.J., Pearson, J., & Liversedge, S.P. (2005). Evidence against competition during syntactic ambiguity resolution. Journal of Memory and Language, 52, 284-307.
	Järvikivi, J., Van Gompel, R.P.G., Hyönä, J., & Bertram, R. (2005). Ambiguous pronoun resolution: Contrasting the first-mention and subject preference accounts. Psychological Science, 260-264.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., & Majid, A. (2004). Antecedent frequency effects during the processing of pronouns. Cognition, 90, 255-264.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., Liversedge, S.P., & Pearson, J. (2004). Antecedent typicality effects in the processing of noun phrase anaphors. In: M. Carreiras, & C. Clifton, Jr. (Eds.), The on-line study of sentence comprehension: Eyetracking, ERP, and beyond (pp. 119-137). Hove: Psychology Press.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., & Liversedge, S.P. (2003). The influence of morphological information on cataphoric pronoun assignment. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 29, 128-139.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., Pickering, M.J., & Traxler, M.J. (2001). Reanalysis in sentence processing: Evidence against current constraint-based and two-stage models. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 225-258.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., & Pickering, M.J. (2001). Lexical guidance in sentence processing: A note on Adams, Clifton, and Mitchell (1998). Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 8, 851-857.
	Traxler, M.J., Pickering, M.J., Clifton, C. Jr., &a,p; Van Gompel, R.P.G. (2000). Evaluating theories of modification of complex noun phrases. In M. De Vincenzi & V. Lombardo (Eds.), Cross-linguistic studies of sentence processing (pp. 149-174). Dordrecht: Kluwer.
	Van Gompel, R.P.G., Pickering, M.J., & Traxler, M.J. (2000). Unrestricted race: A new model of syntactic ambiguity resolution. In: A. Kennedy, R. Radach, D. Heller, & J. Pynte (Eds.), Reading as a perceptual process (pp. 621-648). Oxford: Elsevier.
	Liversedge, S.P., Pickering, M.J., Branigan, H.P., & Van Gompel, R.P.G. (1998). Processing arguments and adjuncts in isolation and context: The case of by-phrases in passives. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 461-475.

Teaching

L2 Research Skills for Psychologists
L3 Language and Cognition
MSc Basic Quantitative Statistics
MSc Intermediate Quantitative Statistics
MSc Eye Movements and Cognition

Administration

Assistant research director
L3 coordinator
Research traineeship coordinator
Experiment course credit coordinator
L3 Language and Cognition coordinator