Cognitive/Developmental Faculty

The role of learning and memory in language processing; Embodied cognition, particularly the relationship between language and systems of perception and action; How language comprehenders process idiosyncratic and creative language; The influence of idiosyncratic syntactic structures on the course of language acquisition.

I have two main emphases in my current research. First, I am interested in understanding the processes that occur as someone encounters syntactic structures with which they are familiar. This work explores questions such as, "What do we remember from our experiences with novel syntactic patterns, and how do these memories influence the way we process language in the future?" My second line of work concerns the relationship between language and the neural systems used in perception and action planning. I am interested in learning when and how language comprehension requires a co-opting of the perception and action systems to run mental simulations of events, and how the relationship between these systems develops.

Borreggine, K. L., & Kaschak, M. P. (in press). The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect: Its all in the timing. Cognitive Science.

Kaschak, M. P., Zwaan, R. A., Aveyard, M., & Yaxley, R. H. (in press). Perception of auditory motion affects language processing. Cognitive Science.

Kaschak, M. P., Loney, R. A., & Borreggine, K. L. (2006). Recent experience affects the strength of structural priming. Cognition, 99, B73-B82.

Kaschak, M. P., & Saffran, J. R. (2006). Idiomatic syntactic constructions and language learning. Cognitive Science, 30, 43-63.

Kaschak, M. P., Madden, C. J., Therriault, D. J., Yaxley, R. H., Aveyard, M. E., Blanchard, A. A., & Zwaan, R. A. (2005). Perception of motion affects language processing. Cognition, 94, B79-B89.

Kaschak, M. P., & Glenberg, A. M. (2004). This construction needs learned. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 133, 450-467.

Gernsbacher, M. A., & Kaschak, M. P. (2003). Neuroimaging studies of language production and comprehension. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 91-114.

Glenberg, A. M., & Kaschak, M. P. (2002). Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9, 558-565.

Kaschak, M. P., & Glenberg, A. M. (2000). Constructing meaning: The role of affordances and grammatical constructions in sentence comprehension. Journal of Memory and Language, 43, 508-529.