Projects per year
Personal profile
Research
My research is aimed at understanding how people comprehend and produce language. An important part of my research involves the investigation of how people process the syntactic structure of sentences (e.g., Van Gompel, 2013). Perhaps surprisingly, our research (Van Gompel, Pickering, & Traxler, 2001; Van Gompel, Pickering, Pearson, & Liversedge, 2005) suggests that sentences that are syntactically ambiguous are often easier to read than sentences that are disambiguated. This provides evidence against the commonly held view that different syntactic analyses of an ambiguous structure compete. Instead, the results suggest that difficulty is due to structural reanalysis.
In other research, we have investigated how the processing of sentences is affected by recent exposure to sentences with a very similar structure, a phenomenon often referred to as structural priming (Arai, Van Gompel, & Scheepers, 2007; Carminati, Van Gompel, Scheepers, & Arai, 2008). It appears that structural priming in language comprehension occurs with the same structures as in language production, but interestingly, priming effects in comprehension are much more lexically driven. In research with Leila Kantola (Kantola & Van Gompel, 2011), we have also used structural priming to investigate the syntactic representations of bilinguals: Our results show that structures that exist in two different languages have one single mental representation.
Another important part of my research is concerned with how people comprehend anaphoric expressions (e.g., Järvikivi, Van Gompel, Hyönä, & Bertram, 2005; Van Gompel & Majid, 2004) and produce them. In collaboration with Kumiko Fukumura, we have recently investigated when people produce either a pronoun or a repeated name or noun phrase to refer back to an earlier introduced discourse entity. Our results show that the choice for a particular anaphoric expression is driven by, amongst others, the similarity of a discourse entity to other entities (Fukumura & Van Gompel, in press; Fukumura, Van Gompel, Harley, & Pickering, in press) and syntactic factors, but interestingly, not by the likelihood that people refer to an entity (Fukumura & Van Gompel, 2010). I am currently also collaborating with computational linguists to test the psychological plausibility of computational models of reference, and we have edited a special issue of the journal TopiCS in Cognitive Science on this issue (Van Deemter, Gatt, Van Gompel, & Krahmer, 2012).
Teaching
I currently teach Psychology of Language (Levels 3, 4 and 5) and Statistics and Methodology (Levels 2 and 5).
Keywords
- BF Psychology
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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
Projects
- 2 Finished
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An Experimental Investigation of Syntactic Priming and the Lexical Boost in Language Production (Joint with University of Umea)
van Gompel, R. (Investigator)
1/08/17 → 31/05/22
Project: Research
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Standard Research Transition Standard Competition DTG (Student Ms Katja Suckow)
Macdonald, M. (Investigator), Murray, W. (Investigator), Smith, F. (Investigator), Vincent, B. (Investigator) & van Gompel, R. (Investigator)
1/04/11 → 30/09/14
Project: Research
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The head or the verb: Is the lexical boost restricted to the head verb?
Kantola, L. (Lead / Corresponding author), van Gompel, R. P. G. & Wakeford, L. J., Feb 2023, In: Journal of Memory and Language. 129, 13 p., 104388.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile4 Citations (Scopus)84 Downloads (Pure) -
The lexical boost in priming of adjunct structures: The repetition of any content word will do
Konradt, A., van Gompel, R. & Kantola, L., 11 Mar 2023.Research output: Contribution to conference › Poster › peer-review
File34 Downloads (Pure) -
Lexically-independent representation of the monotransitive structure
Arai, M. (Lead / Corresponding author) & van Gompel, R. P. G., 1 Sept 2022, In: Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 75, 9, p. 1773-1789 17 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile1 Citation (Scopus)174 Downloads (Pure) -
No looking back: The effects of visual cues on the lexical boost in structural priming
van Gompel, R. (Lead / Corresponding author), Wakeford, L. & Kantola, L., 9 Feb 2022, (E-pub ahead of print) In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. 10 p.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile10 Citations (Scopus)101 Downloads (Pure) -
The decay of the lexical boost: new evidence from noun phrase priming
Konradt, A., van Gompel, R. & Kantola, L., 23 Mar 2022.Research output: Contribution to conference › Poster › peer-review
Datasets
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Is the Lexical Boost Due to the Recency of the Repeated Word: Experimental Data
van Gompel, R. (Creator), UK Data Archive, 21 Jul 2022
DOI: 10.5255/UKDA-SN-855871, https://beta.ukdataservice.ac.uk/datacatalogue/studies/study?id=855871
Dataset
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Is the Lexical Boost Restricted to the Licensing Verb: Experimental Data
van Gompel, R. (Creator), UK Data Archive, 21 Jul 2022
Dataset
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Effects of Visual Cues on the Lexical Boost Effect in Structural Priming
van Gompel, R. (Creator), UK Data Archive, 21 Jul 2022
Dataset
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The Effect of Intervening Sentences on Lexically Independent Priming and the Lexical Boost
van Gompel, R. (Creator), UK Data Archive, 21 Jul 2022
Dataset
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Convenor for Charlotte Starkey's PhD thesis
van Gompel, R. (Member)
28 Sept 2022Activity: Examination types › Examination
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Member of PhD committee for Binger Lu (Ghent University)
van Gompel, R. (Member)
1 Oct 2022 → …Activity: Other activity types › Other
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Phonological, lexical, and discourse effects on the production of sentence structure: evidence from structural priming
van Gompel, R. (Examiner)
17 Feb 2021Activity: Examination types › Examination
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The role of discriminatory power in reference production
van Gompel, R. (Speaker)
3 Sept 2021Activity: Talk or presentation types › Oral presentation
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The lexical boost effectin structural priming: Evidence for head-centred syntactic representations
van Gompel, R. (Speaker)
28 Jun 2021Activity: Talk or presentation types › Invited talk