XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Janet Dean Fodor (born 1942) is distinguished professor of linguistics at the City University of New York. Her primary field is psycholinguistics, and her research interests include human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition

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. 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. She received her Ph.D. in 1970 from MIT, looking at the challenge posed by opaque contexts for semantic compositionality.

Janet Dean Fodor grew up in England. She has a BA in Psychology and Philosophy from Oxford University and a PhD in Linguistics from MIT. Her dissertation, on semantics, was published in 1979 and re-published in 2013. She authored a semantics textbook in 1977.
And then her thoughts turned to sentence parsing: aiming to uncover the psychological mechanisms by which people understand the sentences they hear or read.
In the late 1970s / early 1980s there was little experimental data available, and only a few brave attempts to model syntactic processing. So it was an open field and very exciting. A major focus was on syntactic constructions that were under intense study in theoretical linguistics – constructions in which phrases are moved from one location to another, or are deleted entirely. This is ‘filler-gap’ psycholinguistics, and still thriving.
At much the same time, work with Lyn Frazier, addressing papers by John Kimball, uncovered strong, perhaps universal, biases in the even more basic process of assigning hierarchical structure to linear sequences of words. In work with Atsu Inoue and Yuki Hirose and many fine students since, the linear-to-hierarchical translation in sentence processing has been shown to be sensitive to the lengths of phrases. The phrase length effect in turn has been attributed to prosodic influences on the preferred syntactic structure, even when a sentence is read silently so that any prosodic influence must be due to a prosodic contour that is mentally projected by the reader onto the visually presented sentence. This is what has become known as ‘implicit prosody’.
Moving these ideas forward has been possible over the years thanks to collaborations with gifted graduate students conducting experimental research on languages including Arabic, Bulgarian, Croatian, Hebrew, Japanese, Mandarin, Russian and Turkish, among others.
Another research focus, in extensive collaboration with William Sakas, is what is known as ‘language learnability’: developing theoretical models of syntactic parameter setting in child language acquisition, and testing them in computer simulation studies.

In 1988, Fodor founded the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992. She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997. In 2014, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. A volume of papers in her honor, Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing, was published in 2015.

Fodor supervised 27 dissertations of students from both CUNY and the University of Connecticut. In 2017, she received an honorary doctorate from the Paris Diderot University.

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 off the assumption that initial parsing occurs via the length of the phrase, not the syntactic meaning.

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.

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.

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.

Sources:

Bios & Profiles". Faculty. CUNY. Archived from the original on 8 April 2013. Retrieved 3 April 2013.

Elsevier's Dictionary of Psychological Theories. Elsevier. 2006. p. 194.

Janet Dean Fodor". www.gc.cuny.edu.

"Janet Dean Fodor – WordPress". https://janetdeanfodor.wordpress.com/