I'm a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Research on Language, working primarily in the Kutas Lab. My research examines the relationship between how a mental representation is formed and how it's retrieved later, particularly within the domain of language comprehension. The hypothesis that my dissertation presents is that increased syntactic and semantic processing generates representations that are easier to retrieve. Essentially, the more you hear/know about something, the easier it is to remember later. The implications for this research extend to theories of sentence processing, discourse processing, but it also is relevant for grammars of long-distance dependencies. Additional research (with Ivan Sag) looks at the relationship between judgments of grammaticality and processing difficulty.

SELECTED RESEARCH

Memory Retrieval

(submitted). Hofmeister, P. Representational complexity and memory retrieval in language comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes.

(2007). Hofmeister, P. Representational Complexity and Memory Retrieval in Lanuage Comprehension. Stanford University doctoral dissertation. [.pdf]

(2007). Hofmeister, P. "Memory retrieval effects on filler-gap processing." In D. S. McNamara & J. G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1091-1096). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. [.pdf]

(2007). Hofmeister, P. "Retrievability and gradience in filler-gap dependencies." In M. Elliott, J. Kirby, O. Sawada, E. Staraki and S. Yoon (eds.), Proceedings of 43rd Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, vol. 43, no. 1. [.pdf]

Islands and Processing

(in press). Hofmeister, P. and I.A. Sag. "Cognitive constraints and island effects." Language. Anticipated publication date: mid-2010.

(submitted). Hofmeister, P., I. Arnon, T.F. Jaeger, I.A. Sag, N. Snider. "The source ambiguity problem: Distinguishing the effects of grammar and processing on acceptability judgments."

(2007) Hofmeister, P., T.F. Jaeger, I.A. Sag, I. Arnon, & N. Snider. "Locality and accessibility in wh-questions." In S. Featherston and W. Sternefeld (eds.), Roots: Linguistics in Search of its Evidential Base. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. [.pdf]

(2007). Sag, I.A., P. Hofmeister, and N. Snider. "Processing complexity in subjacency violations: the complex noun phrase constraint." In M. Elliott, J. Kirby, O. Sawada, E. Staraki and S. Yoon (eds.), Proceedings of the 43rd Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society, vol. 43, no. 1, 215-229.

(2006). Arnon, I., N. Snider, P. Hofmeister, T.F. Jaeger, I.A. Sag. "Cross-linguistic variation in a processing account: The case of multiple wh-questions." To appear in Proceedings of BLS 32.

Syntax & Other

(in press). Hofmeister, P. "A linearization account of either . . . or constructions." Natural Language and Linguistic Theory. Anticipated publication date: 05-2010. [.pdf]

RECENT ACADEMIC PRESENTATIONS

(1-7-10). Semantic processing and memory retrieval in language comprehension. Linguistic Society of America Meeting. Baltimore, MD. [.pdf]

About Me

Some things don't work out the way you want them to. Like my dream of becoming a land shark fisherman. Instead, I'm a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Research in Language at UCSD. My research looks at how the complexity of linguistic representations affects memory retrieval. I'm beginning (emphasis on beginning) to investigate some of the neural correlates of referential form processing and filler-gap dependency processing. I also like bicycles and fancy food.