Anuenue Baker-Kukona

Postdoctoral Research Assistant

Project Leader: Dr Yuki Kamide

Contact Details:
Email: Anuenue Baker-Kukona
Phone: (+44)(1382) 384612
Room: 2.28A

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

Biography

Currently, I'm a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Yuki Kamide and Professor Gerry Altmann (University of York). I graduated with a Ph.D. in Perception, Action, and Cognition from the University of Connecticut, where I worked with Dr. Whitney Tabor and Dr. James Magnuson. I also collaborate with researchers at Haskins Laboratories, including Dr. Donald Shankweiler, Dr. David Braze, and Dr. Julie Van Dyke.

Research Interests

When we use language, we bring together rich information about the linguistic structure of an unfolding utterance, with the complex contextual information of the situation at hand. Understanding what constraints are relevant, how are they integrated, and how these constraints are learned, is a complex problem. My research focuses on the formation of structure at the level of the sentence, in both highly and less skilled adult language users, using both experimental and computational methods. I have found it fruitful to explore the hypothesis that complex, "smart" cognitive behaviors, like interpreting a sentence in a rich environmental context, can arise via self-organization, or through the bottom-up interactions of many small elements (e.g., as in the interactions of many small units in a connectionist artificial neural network).

Recently, I have been particularly interested in: interactions between visual and linguistic information during sentence processing; the formation of compositional semantic structures (e.g., "the bat that's beside the star;" "eat the spotted, white cake"); and the question of how the language system can be both vigorously expectation-driven and robustly "bottom‐up."

Publications


Links	Publications
	Journal Articles
	Kukona, A., Fang, S., Aicher, K. A., Chen, H., & Magnuson, J. S. (2011). The time course of anticipatory constraint integration. Cognition, 119, 23–42.
	Kukona, A., & Tabor, W. (2011). Impulse processing: A dynamical systems model of incremental eye movements in the visual world paradigm. Cognitive Science, 35, 1009–1051.
	Chapters
	Magnuson, J. S., Kukona, A., Braze, D., Johns, C. L., Van Dyke, J. A., Tabor, W., Mencl, W. E., Pugh, K. R., & Shankweiler, D. P. (2011). Phonological instability in young adult poor readers: Time course measures and computational modeling. In P. McCardle, J. Ren, O. Tzeng, & B. Miller (Eds.), Dyslexia across languages: Orthography and the brain-‐gene-‐ behavior link. Baltimore, MD: Brookes.
	Refereed conference proceedings
	Cho, P., Szkudlarek, E., Kukona, A., & Tabor, W. (2011). An artificial grammar investigation into the mental encoding of syntactic structure. In L. Carlson, C. Hölscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1679-1684). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
	Magnuson, J. S., Kukona, A., Braze, D., Johns, C. L., Van Dyke, J. A., Tabor, W., Mencl, W. E., Pugh, K. R., & Shankweiler, D. P. (2010). Phonological instability in young adult poor readers. In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1429-1434). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
	Recent presentations
	Kukona, A., & Tabor, W. (2011). Multi-word bottom-up effects in the visual world paradigm. Poster presented at the 17th Annual Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference, Paris, France.
	Kukona, A., Braze, D., Magnuson, J. S., Mencl, W. E., Pugh, K. R., Tabor, W., Van Dyke, J. A., & Shankweiler, D. P. (2011). Reader skill differences in rapid compositional semantic processing. Talk delivered at the 18th Annual Conference of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, St. Pete Beach, FL.
	Kukona, A., Cho, P., Magnuson, J. S., & Tabor, W. (2011). Local lexical coherences in the visual world paradigm. Poster presented at the 24th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Stanford, CA.