Jesse Harris

Associate Professor of Linguistics

UCLA

Biography

I am an associate professor at UCLA in the Department of Linguistics, and advise the UCLA Language Processing Lab. My research investigates how language users develop a sufficiently rich linguistic meaning during online comprehension. Recent topics include the processing of ellipsis and the assignment of focus, as well as the role of other semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic defaults in sentence interpretation.

I am committed to using experimental methods in my research, including Internet-based questionnaires, corpora, and online methods such as self-paced reading and eye tracking. See this page for a description of the various methods and data collection tools used in the lab.

I am an organizer for the California Meeting on Psycholinguistics (CAMP), and hosted the inaugural meeting at UCLA in 2017. CAMP 2018 was held at the University of Southern California. CAMP 2019 was held at UC Santa Cruz. CAMP 2021 was held virtually at UC Irvine. In 2023, CAMP5 returned to UCLA.

As a person who stutters, I’m proud to serve on the Board of Directors of the Myspeech, a non-profit dedicated to facilitating access to high-quality, client-centered speech therapy to people in underserved communities, as well as providing resources on disability rights for students who stutter and education for speech-language pathologists in training.

Before UCLA, I was an assistant professor at Pomona College, in the Department of Linguistics & Cognitive Science.

Interests

Psycholinguistics
Experimental linguistics
Formal semantics and pragmatics
Ellipsis structures
Focus and information structure
Eye movements while reading

Education

PhD in Linguistics, 2012
UMass Amherst
MSc in Logic, 2007
University of Amsterdam
MA in Linguistics, 2003
University of Chicago
BA in Linguistics, 2003
University of Chicago

Research interests

How does the language processing system make efficient use of multiple sources of information to produce a sufficiently rich representation? What information may go underspecified? How does grammatical knowledge constrain representations considered during online sentence processing?

For more details, please refer to this overview of my research agenda or my cv. Ongoing research is also described on the UCLA Language Processing Lab page.

Implicit prosody in processing

Processing sluicing ellipsis

Relative clause attachment in pupillometry

Featured publications

Alternatives in Grammar and Cognition

This edited book brings together research investigating foundational issues relating to the generation and restriction of alternative sets from theoretical and empirical perspectives. It includes contributions from noted scholars in the field to provide theoretical arguments, opinionated perspectives synthesizing existing positions, and empirical evidence from experimentation and fieldwork in support of a theoretical framework. Alternatives have come to occupy a central place in formal semantic theory, and are referenced in notable accounts of various phenomena, including focus, negation, implicature, modality, counterfactuals, and contrastive topics, among others. More recently, experimental investigations have addressed the mental activation and availability of alternatives in sentence comprehension and memory representations, finding that alternative meanings are computed during incremental processing, and persist in memory after sentence completion for a limited amount of time. The diverse perspectives represented in this volume will serve to clarify and guide the major avenues available in future research on the topic, and the book will be of interest to graduate students and researchers in fields such as linguistics (especially psycholinguistics and experimental pragmatics), philosophy and cognitive science.

Nicole Gotzner, Jesse A. Harris, Richard Breheny, Yael Sharvit

PDF

Acceptability Judgments at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

This chapter reviews the theoretical and conceptual issues central to acceptability judgment tasks, and related paradigms, at the syntax-semantics interface, and provides a broad overview of core results obtained from research in this domain. Challenges faced by studies in experimental semantics are distinct from those in experimental syntax, which at times requires different linking hypotheses, research questions, or experimental paradigms. However, the current state of affairs suggests that acceptability and other offline judgments will continue to contribute highly informative and profitable tools for exploration of phenomena at the syntax-semantics interface.

Jesse A. Harris

Preprint

Acceptability Judgments at the Syntax-Semantics Interface

Extended perspective shift and discourse economy in language processing

Research spanning linguistics, psychology, and philosophy suggests that speakers and hearers are finely attuned to perspectives and viewpoints that are not their own, even though perspectival information is not encoded directly in the morphosyntax of languages like English. While some terms seem to require a perspective or a judge for interpretation (e.g., epithets, evaluative adjectives, locational PPs, etc.), perspective may also be determined on the basis of subtle information spanning multiple sentences, especially in vivid styles of narrative reporting. In this paper, I develop an account of the cues that are involved in evaluating and maintaining non- speaker perspectives, and present an economy-based discourse processing model of perspective that embodies two core principles. First, perspectives are subject to a “speaker-default”, but may shift to a non-speaker perspective if sufficient contextual cues are provided. Second, the processor follows the path of least resistance to maintaining perspective, opting to maintain the current perspective across sentences as long as the shifted perspective continues to be coherent. The predictions of the model are tested in a series of offline and online studies, manipulating the form of an attitude report and the tense of the sentence that follows. Implications for processing perspective and viewpoint in speech and narrative forms are explored.

Jesse A. Harris

Preprint

Extended perspective shift and discourse economy in language processing

Contextual constraint and lexical competition: Revisiting biased misperception during reading

In identifying and accessing lexical items while comprehending text, readers must rapidly select a word from visually similar words before integrating it into a sentence. It has been proposed that readers are likely to misperceive a low frequency word as a highly frequent orthographically similar alternative, particularly when the alternative is supported by previous context (Perea & Pollatsek, 1998; Pollatsek et al., 1999; Slattery, 2009; Gregg & Inhoff, 2016). In such cases, the misperception may not be corrected until the reader encounters incongruent information. However, many of these studies place incongruent text directly after the critical word, confounding whether readers regress backwards in text to resolve their misperception or to halt forward text progression in order resolve a lexical level conflict between the word form and its competitor. In three eye tracking while reading experiments, we adapted materials from previous studies to include a post-critical spillover region to address this possibility. Two of these experiments were designed to permit an ex-Gaussian analysis of the distribution of first pass reading prior to disambiguating information. The evidence suggests that post-lexical competition-inhibition between orthographically similar forms can delay forward movement of the eyes as a competitor is inhibited. The possibility that misperception and post-lexical competition-inhibition arise from the same set of mechanisms is discussed.

Jesse A. Harris, Stephanie Rich, Ian Rigby

Preprint

Contextual constraint and lexical competition: Revisiting biased misperception during reading

Recent Publications

Search for content by filtering publications.

Christian Muxica, Jesse A. Harris (2025). Constructing Alternatives: Evidence for the Early Availability of Contextually Relevant Focus Alternatives. Alternatives in Grammar and Cognition.

Preprint

Nicole Gotzner, Jesse A. Harris, Richard Breheny, Yael Sharvit (2025). Alternatives in Grammar and Cognition. Alternatives in Grammar and Cognition.

PDF

Stefan Hinterwimmer, Jesse A. Harris (2024). The interaction of gender marking and perspective-taking in German. Sinn und Bedeutung.

Preprint

Christian Muxica, Jesse A. Harris (2024). Constructing focus alternatives from context and the limits of semantic priming. ELM 3.

Preprint

Maria Lialiou, Jesse A. Harris, Martine Grice, Petra B. Schumacher (2024). Attention Allocation to Deviants with Intonational Rises and Falls: Evidence from Pupillometry. Proceedings of Cognitive Science.

Preprint

See all publications

Presentations

Recent and upcoming

In this talk, I present an overview of a lesser-known method, pupillometry, a natural, real-time measure of pupil dilation. Traditionally used to study cognitive response to memory, cognitive and attentional load, and emotional valence, pupillometry has also been used as a measure of effort expended in language comprehension. Increased pupil size has been observed for syntactically complex sentences (Engelhardt et al., 2010), violations of expected meter (Scheepers et al., 2013), and inadequate or misleading pitch accent (Zellin et al., 2011). I present a series of ongoing studies on classic attachment ambiguities in English, suggesting that the pupil responds to mismatches between prosodic and syntactic grouping. Preliminary analyses suggest that penalties for prosodic mismatch are also modulated by violation of additional structural or pragmatic expectations. I discuss implications for theories of prosody-syntax alignment in real-time sentence parsing, along with a comparison of the practical, methodological, and interpretive tradeoffs associated with this method.

Mar 24, 2022 University of California, Santa Cruz

Jesse A. Harris

Commitments de lingua in transparent free relatives.

Feb 22, 2022 University of Tübingen

Jesse A. Harris

See all talks

Teaching

Courses for 2024-2025

Spring 2025. Language Processing [Ling 132]

Course description:

Psycholinguistics is a relatively young, but rapidly growing, discipline that addresses how language might be realized as a component within the general cognitive system, and how language is comprehended, produced, and represented in memory. It is an interdisciplinary effort, drawing on research and techniques from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science, and utilizes a variety of methods to investigate the underlying representations and mechanisms that are involved in linguistic computations.

This course concentrates on (i) uncovering and characterizing the subsystems that account for linguistic performance, (ii) exploring how such subsystems interact, and whether they interact within a fixed order, and (iii) investigating how the major linguistic subsystems relate to more general cognitive mechanisms.

Spring 2025. Pragmatic Theory [Ling 207]

Course description

Pragmatics explores the systematic relation between what was intended and what was literally said by examining what inferences can be made from a sentence meaning in a particular context of utterance, given what is known about the speaker and the participants in the discourse. Once treated as a virtual unstructured wasteland of non-linguistic information, pragmatics is reaching a new maturity as it more closely interfaces with linguistic subsystems. Pragmatic research addresses a notoriously broad domain. The course design emphasizes the theoretical components of pragmatics research, focusing on topics that highlight the internal structure of pragmatic mechanisms or the ways in which pragmatic information is embedded within the architecture of the language faculty. It also introduces methods and ongoing developments in experimental pragmatics, an area that has become a driving force in shaping research interests in the field.

This course starts by reviewing the classic cooperative foundations of pragmatic theory initiated by Grice, and then highlights recent advances in the field, concentrating on numerous major topics of current interest, including (a) Pragmatic theory and implicatures since Grice 1975, (b) Projection and not-at-issue content, (c) Speech acts, common ground, and speaker commitments, and (d) Choice points in formalizing context, discourse, and speaker, among others topics.

Courses taught at UCLA

Undergraduate

LING 8: Language in Context
LING 120C: Semantics I
LING 132: Language Processing

Graduate

Ling 207: Pragmatic Theory
Ling 239: Research Design and Statistical Methods
LING 252: Topics in Semantics
- Fall 2016: Focus in Meaning and Experimentation
LING 254: Topics in Linguistics
- Winter 2015: Evaluating perspective in meaning and discourse
- Fall 2017: Implicit prosody and sentence processing
- Spring 2021: Modification and subjectivity
LING 264: Psycholinguistics / Neurolingusitics Seminar

Resources

Eye tracking corpora and tools

Los Angeles Reading Corpus of Individual Differences

The Los Angeles Reading Corpus of Individual Differences (LARCID) is a corpus of natural reading and individual differences measures. The corpus is currently a feasibility pilot of eye tracking data collected from 15 readers. Five texts from public domain sources were included. In addition to the eye tracking measures, a battery of individual difference measures, along with basic demographic information, was collected in a separate session. Individual difference measures included the Rapid Automatized Naming, Reading Span, N-Back, and Raven’s Progressive Matrices tasks.

Pilot data, write up, and R-markdown files can be found on this Open Science Framework page. Comments welcome!

Robodoc

Robodoc is a Python program that automatically cleans eye tracking data of blinks and track losses. This new version improves usability and command line options. Learn more about this handy code here.

Corpus tools

Linguistic diversity in California

This tutorial shows how to use R to access the US Census to visualize language families spoken in the United States. The interactive Shiny app below illustrates how various languages are distributed in California according to the 2012 American Community Survey.

A fully executable R Markdown tutorial is hosted on github. To clone with git, run this command from the terminal:

git clone https://github.com/jaharris/Linguistic_Diversity_CA.git

Embedded appositives corpus

The Embedded Appositives Corpus is an annotated collection of 278 sentences containing appositives embedded syntactically in the complement of propositional attitude predicates and verbs of saying, drawn from 177 million words of novels, newspaper articles, and TV transcripts. Intended to inform work on appositives, conventional implicatures, and textual entailment. Includes a Javascript interface, an XML corpus, and a short write-up describing the data and their theoretical relevance.

NPR Corpus scraper

THE NPR Corpus scraper is a collection of Python programs built to crawl NPR and download transcripts into XML format, with links to audio files of radio interviews into a directory. It can be tweaked to crawl other news sites. Note: this tool requires a working knowledge of Python. To be posted with instructions soon!

Trends for academic posts in linguistics

The script downloads the Linguist List job posting archives for the years specified below. After some reformatting, it removes all but tenure track job postings and categorizes the jobs according to keywords listed in the posting. The method for categorization largely follows previous efforts; see the Language Log postings on the 2008 data, 2009 data, and 2009-2012 data.

A fully executable R Markdown tutorial is hosted on github. To clone with git, run this command from the terminal:

git clone https://github.com/jaharris/linglist-scrape.git

Odds and ends

CombineResults.rb.

Simple to the point of trivial, this Ruby program writes results from Linger’s .dat files to a single file with the experiment name automatically appended along with the number of subjects run. Primarily for command line phobics. If Ruby is installed on Windows, simply place in the same folder as your .dat files, and then double click on the icon to run. Also works with Mac and Linux.