About
Julie Boland investigates language processing from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her research focuses on the interfaces of word recognition, syntactic processing, and semantic processing. She is interested in questions about how syntactic knowledge is stored and accessed, how real world knowledge and linguistic knowledge are integrated, and how sociolinguistic cues contribute to recovery of meaning during language comprehension. Her current research encompasses the processing and representation of grammatical variation in dialects, grammatical representation and processing in bilinguals, and the interface between language processing and executive function.
She regularly teaches courses for the Psychology Department on research methods and the psychology of language. Professor Boland has supervised multiple PhD dissertations at the University of Michigan: Lauren Squires, “Sociolinguistic priming and the perception of agreement variation: Testing predictions of exemplar-theoretic grammar” (co-chaired with Robin Queen, 2011), Yu-Fen Hsieh “Sentence Processing in Chinese and Chinese-English Bilinguals: Syntax-Semantics Interaction During Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution” (2010), Damon Tutunjian “Processing coordinated verb phrases: The relevance of lexical-semantic, conceptual, and contextual information towards establishing verbal parallelism” (2010), Lillian Chen “Multiple meaning activation in spoken word recognition, within and between languages” (2008), and Maya M. Khanna “The Development of Language Context Use: The Role of Executive Functions” (2006).
Prospective graduate students interested in working with Professor Boland are encouraged to contact her via email before applying.
Selected Publications
- Boland, J. E., Kaan, E., Valdes Kroff, J., & Wulff, S. (in press). Linguistic variation & Psycholinguistics. Linguistics Vanguard.
- Boland J. E. & Queen R. (2016). Why grammar mistakes in a short email could make some people judge you. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/why-grammar-mistakes-in-a-short-email-could-make-some-people-judge-you-57168
- Boland J. E. & Queen R. (2016). If You’re House Is Still Available, Send Me an Email: Personality Influences Reactions to Written Errors in Email Messages. PLoS ONE 11(3): e0149885. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0149885.
- Wei H., Dong Y., Boland J.E. and Yuan F. (2016).Structural priming and frequency effects interact in Chinese sentence comprehension. Front. Psychol. 7:45. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00045
- Queen R. & Boland, J.E. (2015) I think your going to like me: Exploring the role of mistakes in email messages on assessments of potential housemates. Linguistics Vanguard, 1 (1), 283–293, ISSN (Online) 2199-174X,DOI: 10.1515/lingvan-2015-0011.
- Yu, J., Zhang, Y., & Boland, J.E., & Cai, L. (2015). The interplay between referential processing and local syntactic/semantic processing : ERPs to written Chinese discourses. Brain Research, 1597, 139-158. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.brainres.2014.12.013
- Hsieh, Y. & Boland, J. E. (2015). Semantic support and parallel parsing in Chinese. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 44, 251-276. 10.1007/s10936-014-9296-4
- Boland, J. E. (2014). Review of “A History of Psycholinguistics: The pre-Chomskyan era,” by Willem J. M. Levelt. Historiographia Linguistica, International Journal for the History of the Language Sciences, 41(1), 168-175. 10.1075/hl.41.1.10bol
Affiliation(s)
Field(s) of Study
- Psycholinguistics, sentence comprehension and parsing, lexical access and representation, sociolinguistic variables in sentence processing, bilingual language processing
