Curriculum Vitae

Linguistics and Cognitive Science Pomona College 185 E. 6th St. Claremont, California 91711

Office: (909) 607-1602 Fax: (909) 621-8644 e-mail: robert.thornton@pomona.edu http://pages.pomona.edu/~rt004747/index.html

Education

1994	B.A.	Psychology, University of Kansas
2000	Ph.D.	Cognitive Psychology, University of Southern California

Academic Appointments

2000- 2002		Postdoctoral Fellow Center for Research in Language University of California, San Diego
2002- 2005		Mellon Fellow Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences Pomona College
2005- present		Research Associate Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences Pomona College

Honors and Awards

1995	National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship: Honorable Mention
1997	Linguistic Society of America Summer Institute Fellowship
1999	University Dissertation Fellowship-University of Southern California
2007	National Institute on Aging (NIA) Summer Institute

Affiliations

1995-	American Psychological Association
1997-	Linguistic Society of America
1998-	American Psychological Society
2004-	Psychonomic Society, Associate Member

Professional Experience

	Journal Article Reviews Brain and Language Cognition Journal of Applied Gerontology Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition Journal of Memory and Language Journal of Psycholinguistic Research Language and Cognitive Processes Memory & Cognition Psychological Science
	Grant Reviews National Science Foundation (NSF)
	Conference Abstracts Reviews CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics (WCCFL)
	Conference Organizing Tenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing (1997) Organizational Committee University of Southern California Speech Production Conference (1999) Organizational Committee

Teaching Experience

Research Interests

Grants

2005-2010

National Institute of Aging Career Development Award (K01), "On-line sentence processing in older and younger adults", NIA K01 AG025195, $560,075 direct costs

Publications and Manuscripts

Thornton, R., Gil, M., & MacDonald, M. C. (1998). Accounting for crosslinguistic variation: A constraint-based perspective. In D. Hillert (Ed.) Syntax and Semantics, Vol. 31, Sentence Processing: A Crosslinguistic Perspective (pp. 211-225). Academic Press: San Diego, CA. (abstract, .ps, .ps.Z, .pdf)

Thornton, R., MacDonald, M. C., & 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. (abstract or .pdf version)

Thornton, R., MacDonald, M. C., & Arnold, J. E. (2000). The concomitant effects of phrase length and informational content in sentence comprehension. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 29, 195-203. (abstract or .pdf version)

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

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.

Haskell, T. R., Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M. C. (2007). A structural priming account of subject-verb agreement errors.. Manuscript submitted for publication.

MacDonald, M. C., & Thornton, R. (2008). When language comprehension reflects production constraints: Resolving ambiguities with the help of past experience. Manuscript submitted for publication. (abstract)

Hackl, M., & Thornton, R. (Eds.) (2007). Asserting, meaning, and implying: Papers in semantics, pragmatics, and the philosophy of language. Edited volume under review.

Conference Presentations:

Thornton, R., Gil, M., & MacDonald, M. C. (March, 1995). Prepositional phrase attachment in English and Spanish. Poster presented at the Eighth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Tucson, AZ.

Thornton, R., Gil, M., & MacDonald, M. C. (November, 1995). Resolving modification ambiguities in English and Spanish. Poster presented at the Thirty-sixth Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Los Angeles, CA.

Arnold, J., Thornton, R., Gil, M., & MacDonald, M. C. (March, 1996). The effects of parallelism and subjecthood on the repeated name penalty. Poster presented at the Ninth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY.

MacDonald, M. C., & Thornton, R. (March, 1996). Constraint-based models and modification ambiguities. Poster presented at the Ninth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY.

Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M. C. (March, 1999a). The effect of phrase length on modification ambiguities. Paper presented at the Twelfth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY. (abstract, and .ps, .ps.Z, .pdf versions of the overheads)

Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M. C. (March, 1999b). Plausibility effects on subject-verb agreement errors in English. Poster presented at the Twelfth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, New York, NY.

Harm, M. W., Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M. C. (March, 2000). A distributed, large scale connectionist model of the interaction of lexical and semantic constraints in syntactic ambiguity resolution. Poster presented at the Thirteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, La Jolla, CA. (abstract, and .ps, .ps.Z, .pdf versions of the handout)

Thornton, R., & MacDonald, M. C. (March, 2001). Plausibility and grammatical agreement. Paper presented at the Fourteenth Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Philadelphia, PA.

Thornton, R., Haskell, T. R., & MacDonald, M. C. (September, 2001). A distributional account of agreement production. Paper presented at the Seventh Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing (AMLaP), Saarbrucken, Germany.

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)

Thornton, R., Skovbroten, K., & Burke, D.M. (November, 2004). Grammatical agreement processes in young and older adults. Poster presented at the Forty-Fifth Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, MN. (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)

R. Thornton --Last modified Tue Jul 07 11:12:28 PDT 2005