Background and Research Interests

My primary research interests are in psycholinguistics; specifically (1) sentence processing, (2) cognitive aging, (3) grammatical agreement processes, (4) the relationship between production and comprehension, (5) formal models of language acquisition, and (6) connectionism. See my research statement for more information about this work.

Click on the appropriate links to view my curriculum vitae, a list of my academic bookmarks, or download available publications and presentations. If you're a latex user, you can copy my bibtex file, which has over 2,700 cognitive science references.

Recent Courses

Current Grant Support

Representative Publications

Thornton, R., MacDonald, M. C., and Gil, M. (1999). Pragmatic constraint on the interpretation of complex noun phrases in Spanish and English. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 1347-1365.

Thornton, R., MacDonald, M. C., and Arnold, J. E. (2000). The concomitant effects of phrase length and informational content on sentence processing. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 195-203.

Thornton, R., and MacDonald, M. C. (2003). Plausibility and grammatical agreement. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 740-759.

Thornton, R., & Light, L.L. (2006). Language comprehension and production in normal aging. In J.E. Birren & K.W. Schaie (Eds.) Handbook of the Psychology of Aging (6th ed.) (pp. 261-287). San Diego, CA: Elsevier.

Selected Recent Conference Presentations

Acland, B., Baggette, N., Bley-Vroman, H., Klein, N., Llewellyn, E., Osborne, G., Stiglitz, J., Waser, A., Thornton, R., & Hackl, M. (March, 2004). Integrating the spatial semantics of verbs and prepositions. Poster presented at the Seventeenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, College Park, MD. (abstract, pdf version of the handout)

Haskell, T.R., Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M.C. (March, 2005). Structural priming and the production of subject-verb agreement. Poster presented at the Eighteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Tucson, AZ. (pdf version of the handout)

Thornton, R. (March, 2006). Contextual expectations in modification ambiguities. Poster presented at the Nineteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY. (pdf version of the handout)

Thornton, R., Skovbroten, K. A., & Creech, N. (April, 2006) Does grammatical processing change in normal aging? Poster presented at the Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, GA. (pdf version of the handout)

Thornton, R., & Bye, J. (March, 2008). Syntactic category ambiguity and grammatical agreement. Poster presented at the Twenty-First Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Chapel Hill, NC. (pdf version of the handout)