Janet Dean Fodor

Last updated
Janet Dean Fodor
Janet Fodor.jpg
Janet Fodor in 2011
BornApril 12, 1942
DiedAugust 28, 2023(2023-08-28) (aged 81) [1]
Alma mater MIT, Oxford
Scientific career
Fields Psycholinguistics
Institutions CUNY Graduate Center
Doctoral advisor Noam Chomsky, James Thomson

Janet Dean Fodor (April 12, 1942-August 28, 2023) [2] was distinguished professor emerita of linguistics at the City University of New York. [3] Her primary field was psycholinguistics, [4] and her research interests included human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition. [3] [5]

Contents

Life

Born Janet Dean, she grew up in England and received her B.A. in 1964 and her M.A. in 1966, both from Oxford University. [6] At Oxford she was a student of the social psychologist Michael Argyle, and their 'equilibrium hypothesis' for nonverbal communication became the basis for affiliative conflict theory: if participants feel the degree of intimacy suggested by a channel of nonverbal communication to be too high, they act to reduce the intimacy conveyed through other channels. [7] She received her Ph.D. in 1970 from MIT, [8] looking at the challenge posed by opaque contexts for semantic compositionality. She came to the Graduate Center at CUNY from the University of Connecticut in 1986 as a distinguished professor of linguistics. In 1988, Fodor founded the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. [9] Fodor supervised ca 27 dissertations of students from both CUNY and the University of Connecticut. [10]

She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992. [11] She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997 and was named a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America in 2006. [12] [13] In 2014, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. [14] A volume of papers in her honor, Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing, was published in 2015. [15] In 2017, she received an honorary doctorate from the Paris Diderot University. [16]

She was married to Jerry Alan Fodor until his death in 2017.

Summary of major publications

A New Two-Stage Parsing Model

Fodor and Lyn Frazier proposed a new two-stage model of parsing human sentences and the syntactic analysis of these sentences. The first step of this new model is to “assign lexical and phrasal nodes to groups of words within the lexical string that is received”. The second step is to add higher nonterminal nodes and combines these newly created phrases into a sentence. Fodor and Frazier suggest this new method because it can transcend the complexities of language by parsing only a few words at a time. Their model is based on the assumption that initial parsing occurs via the length of the phrase, not the syntactic meaning. [17]

Comprehending Sentence Structure

Through a series of sentence analyses, Fodor found that the “WH-trace appears in mental representations of sentence structure, but NP-trace does not”. WH-trace is the placement of interrogative words (who, what, where) in a sentence. Her findings did not support those of McElree, Bever, or MacDonald, but she acknowledges that there are different types of sentences that are going to create linguistic issues that linguists don’t know how to deal with yet. Using this same data, Fodor also finds that passive verbs are more memorable than adjectives during language production. [18]

Psycholinguistics Cannot Escape Prosody

In this article, Fodor emphasizes the importance of integrating prosody into research on sentence processing. She argues that past research has focused on syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences, but people use prosody when reading, which affects reading comprehension and sentence analysis. She also brings up the idea that people use prosody when writing, not just reading, which further affects sentence production and sentence structure. She blames technology for this new need, largely because of the newfound availability of information. [19]

Empty Categories in Sentence Processing

Building off of the work of her doctoral advisor, Noam Chomsky, Fodor wrote an article on the importance of identifying empty categories in sentence processing. Empty categories can “account for certain regularities of sentence structure”, and attaching it with a previous word or phrase can help determine what it means. Figuring out and understanding the meaning of empty categories requires a linguistic background, but all language-speakers have the ability to use empty categories. [20]

Selected works

Related Research Articles

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Neurolinguistics</span> Neuroscience and linguistics-related studies

Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field, neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, communication disorders and neuropsychology. Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language. Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories, using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling.

In linguistics, linguistic competence is the system of unconscious knowledge that one knows when they know a language. It is distinguished from linguistic performance, which includes all other factors that allow one to use one's language in practice.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Treebank</span>

In linguistics, a treebank is a parsed text corpus that annotates syntactic or semantic sentence structure. The construction of parsed corpora in the early 1990s revolutionized computational linguistics, which benefitted from large-scale empirical data.

Marianne Mithun is an American linguist specializing in American Indian languages and language typology. She is a professor of linguistics at the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she has held an academic position since 1986.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Janet Pierrehumbert</span> American linguist

Janet Pierrehumbert is Professor of Language Modelling in the Oxford e-Research Centre at the University of Oxford and a senior research fellow of Trinity College, Oxford. She developed an intonational model which includes a grammar of intonation patterns and an explicit algorithm for calculating pitch contours in speech, as well as an account of intonational meaning. It has been widely influential in speech technology, psycholinguistics, and theories of language form and meaning. Pierrehumbert is also affiliated with the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour at the University of Canterbury.

Bootstrapping is a term used in language acquisition in the field of linguistics. It refers to the idea that humans are born innately equipped with a mental faculty that forms the basis of language. It is this language faculty that allows children to effortlessly acquire language. As a process, bootstrapping can be divided into different domains, according to whether it involves semantic bootstrapping, syntactic bootstrapping, prosodic bootstrapping, or pragmatic bootstrapping.

In linguistics, grammaticality is determined by the conformity to language usage as derived by the grammar of a particular speech variety. The notion of grammaticality rose alongside the theory of generative grammar, the goal of which is to formulate rules that define well-formed, grammatical, sentences. These rules of grammaticality also provide explanations of ill-formed, ungrammatical sentences.

Nina Hyams is a distinguished research professor emeritus in linguistics at the University of California in Los Angeles.

Lila Ruth Gleitman was an American professor of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She was an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on children's learning of their first language.

Sandra (Sandy) Chung is an American linguist and distinguished professor emerita at the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on Austronesian languages and syntax.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Angela D. Friederici</span> German cognitive scientist (born 1952)

Angela Friederici is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in neuropsychology and linguistics. She is the author of over 400 academic articles and book chapters, and has edited 15 books on linguistics, neuroscience, language and psychology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ilse Lehiste</span> American linguist from Estonia

Ilse Lehiste was an Estonian-born American linguist, author of many studies in phonetics.

Lyn Frazier (born October 15, 1952, in Madison, Wisconsin) is an experimental linguist, focusing on psycholinguistic research of adult sentence comprehension. She is professor emerita at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice Harris (linguist)</span> American linguist and caucasologist (b. 1947)

Alice Carmichael Harris is an American linguist. She is Professor emerita of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Elisabeth O. Selkirk is a theoretical linguist specializing in phonological theory and the syntax-phonology interface. She is currently a professor emerita in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Megan Jane Crowhurst is an Australian- and Canadian-raised linguist and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin in the United States.

Donca Steriade is a professor of Linguistics at MIT, specializing in phonological theory.

Maria Fernanda Ferreira is a cognitive psychologist known for empirical investigations in psycholinguistics and language processing. Ferreira is Professor of Psychology and the Principal investigator of the Ferreira Lab at University of California, Davis.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Diane Brentari</span> American linguist

Diane Brentari is an American linguist who specializes in sign languages and American Sign Language in particular.

References

  1. ↑ https://www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2023/10/04/memoriam-janet-dean-fodor-1997-lsa-president-1942-2023
  2. ↑ https://www.gc.cuny.edu/news/memoriam-emerita-distinguished-professor-linguistics-janet-dean-fodor
  3. 1 2 "Janet Dean Fodor". The Graduate Center. CUNY. Retrieved 3 April 2013.
  4. ↑ "Bios & Profiles". Faculty. CUNY. Archived from the original on 8 April 2013. Retrieved 3 April 2013.
  5. ↑ "Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  6. ↑ "Janet Dean Fodor – WordPress" . Retrieved 2019-04-03.
  7. ↑ Elsevier's Dictionary of Psychological Theories . Elsevier. 2006. pp.  194. ISBN   9780444517500.
  8. ↑ "Alumni and their Dissertations – MIT Linguistics". linguistics.mit.edu. Retrieved 2017-11-04.
  9. ↑ "Janet Dean Fodor". www.gc.cuny.edu. Retrieved 2015-07-22.
  10. ↑ "Jerry Dean Fodor – Dissertations Supervised". www.janetdeanfodor.wordpress.com. 30 June 2016. Retrieved 2019-04-03.
  11. ↑ "Janet Dean Fodor Guggenheim Fellow". John Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
  12. ↑ "Presidents". Linguistics Society of America. Retrieved 3 April 2013.
  13. ↑ "LSA Fellows By Name | Linguistic Society of America". www.linguisticsociety.org. Retrieved 2022-12-31.
  14. ↑ "British Academy announces 42 new fellows". Times Higher Education. 18 July 2014. Retrieved 18 July 2014.
  15. ↑ Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing. Springer. 2015. ISBN   978-3-319-12961-7.
  16. ↑ "Jerry Dean Fodor – Bio". www.janetdeanfodor.wordpress.com. Retrieved 2019-04-03.
  17. ↑ Frazier, Lyn; Fodor, Janet Dean (1978-01-01). "The sausage machine: A new two-stage parsing model". Cognition. 6 (4): 291–325. doi:10.1016/0010-0277(78)90002-1. ISSN   0010-0277. S2CID   53188302.
  18. ↑ Fodor, Janet Dean (1995). An Invitation to Cognitive Science. MIT Press. pp. 209–246.
  19. ↑ Fodor, Janet Dean (2002). "Psycholinguistics Cannot Escape Prosody" (PDF). ISCA-Speech.
  20. ↑ Fodor, Janet Dean (1989-09-01). "Empty categories in sentence processing". Language and Cognitive Processes. 4 (3–4): SI155–SI209. doi:10.1080/01690968908406367. ISSN   0169-0965.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.