Type of Talk: UTCS Colloquim/AI

Speaker/Affiliation: &

nbsp; Zenzi Griffin/University of Texas at Austin

Date/Time: 

Friday, February 13, 2009  11:00 a.m.

Location:   ACES

2.402

Host:  Forum for Artificial Intelligence

Talk Title

:  "How Speakers'' Eye Movements Reflect Spoken Language Genera

tion"

Talk Abstract:

When people describe visually prese

nted scenes, they gaze at each object for approximately one second before

referring to it (Griffin & Bock, 2000). The time spent gazing at an o

bject reflects the difficulty of selecting and retrieving a name for it (Gr

iffin, 2001). Speakers even look at the objects that they intend to talk a

bout for a second before they make speech errors (e.g., accidentally calli

ng an axe "a hammer"; Griffin, 2004) and before they intentio

nally use inaccurate names to describe objects (e.g., deliberately calling
a dog "a cat"; Griffin & Oppenheimer, 2006). Thus, spe

akers'' eyes reveal when they prepare the words they use to refer to visibl

e referents. Furthermore, recent experiments suggest that eye movement dat

a may also constrain theories about syntactic planning in language producti

on.

Speaker Bio:

Zenzi M. Griffin studies the processes t

hat allow people to express anything using spoken language. She is particul

arly concerned with how people select and order words and phrases, and the
way that they manage (and mismanage) the timing of word retrieval and the

articulation of speech. Dr. Griffin is a graduate of the International Bacc

alaureate program at Kungsholmens Gymnasium in Stockholm, Sweden. She stud

ied psychology at Stockholm University for one year before transferring to

Michigan State University, where she earned a BA in Psychology and worked

with Dr. Rose Zacks. In 1998, she received a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology
(with a minor in Linguistics) from the Department of Psychology at the Uni

versity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There she worked with Dr. Kathryn

Bock and Dr. Gary Dell. She spent three years as an assistant professor in

the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. Dr. Griffin became an

assistant professor in the School of Psychology at Georgia Tech in the summ

er of 2001 and was promoted to associate professor in 2005. She spent the 2

006-2007 academic year as a visiting scientist at Hunter College in New Yor

k in the Language Acquisition Research Center. In 2008, she joined the Dep

artment of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin as a full profes

sor.