About

Julie Boland investigates language processing from an interdisciplinary perspective, focusing on the interfaces of word recognition, syntactic processing, and semantic processing. Her research explores how syntactic knowledge is stored and accessed, how real-world knowledge and linguistic knowledge are integrated, and how sociolinguistic cues contribute to the recovery of meaning during language comprehension. Her current research encompasses the processing and representation of grammatical variation in dialects, grammatical representation and processing in bilinguals, and the interface between language processing and executive function. She regularly teaches courses for the Psychology Department on research methods and the psychology of language. Boland has supervised multiple PhD dissertations at the University of Michigan, contributing to the fields of psycholinguistics and sentence comprehension.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Natural Language Processing
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Human–computer interaction
• Physics
• Communication
• Speech recognition
• Chemistry
• Mathematics
• History
• Mathematics education
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Incremental sentence planning incorporates hierarchical and linear planning for both SVO and SOV languages

  Language Cognition and Neuroscience · 2025-10-21

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Effects of language status and interlocutor familiarity on linguistic alignment in <scp>L1</scp> and <scp>L2</scp> dialogues

  TESOL Quarterly · 2025-07-18

  articleSenior author

  Abstract Native speakers tend to mirror the phrases and structures of interlocutors, which is known as alignment. Alignment is likely the result of an automatic process that facilitates speakers' mutual understanding as well as a strategic process influenced by social affective factors, such as the level of familiarity between interlocutors. However, the extent to which second language (L2) learners exhibit these effects remains unclear. Additionally, there is limited knowledge about how L2 alignment behavior relates to L2 learners' interaction patterns in their mother tongue. This study aimed to address these gaps by comparing the alignment of bigrams (word pairs) and task‐oriented structures between familiar and unfamiliar peers in map task dialogues. We tested three groups of speakers (i.e., Chinese native speakers, English native speakers, and Chinese‐speaking learners of English). Both native speakers and L2 learners aligned with their interlocutors, but L2 learners exhibited greater bigram alignment and L1 speakers displayed greater alignment of task‐oriented structures. Furthermore, L2 learners were more likely to reuse unfamiliar interlocutors' bigrams as compared with familiar interlocutors. Interlocutor familiarity did not modulate the alignment rate in either L1 English or L1 Chinese. We conclude that L2 alignment might be strategic to some extent, whereas native speakers' alignment may be highly automatic.

  PublisherDOI

• When Chinese verb transitivity meets wrong syntactic category

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Turn transition time in the map task: visual cues and electronic transmission delays

  Language Cognition and Neuroscience · 2025-03-11

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Getting to Know Them: Effects of Familiarity, Identity, and modeling on the Production of Singular Specific they : Supplemental material

  Language · 2024-12-01

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Getting to Know Them: Effects of Familiarity, Identity, and modeling on the Production of Singular Specific they

  Language · 2024-12-01 · 2 citations

  articleSenior author

  Abstract: The English pronoun they is currently undergoing a rapid change, in that they is increasingly being used to refer to specific (named) individuals as a singular personal pronoun. Although it has been used with a singular, indefinite antecedent for centuries, singular specific they is relatively new and coincides with rising recognition of the fluidity of gender identity and expression. For many individuals, they / them pronouns fit their gender identity best. However, such individuals are at a high risk of being misgendered because this new usage of they is neither well established grammatically nor part of prescribed use. In two experiments, adults from across the United States created short written narratives about individuals of different gender presentations. We varied whether participants saw a pronoun in the stimuli and, if so, whether they saw they, he , or she . We found that singular specific they was used less than she / he and that they -usage increased for those who reported being more familiar with it and with the LGBTQ+ community more generally. We further found that images that appeared androgynous or nonbinary were more likely to elicit singular specific they than were images that appeared binary. Finally, we varied whether participants received brief information about the person that included singular specific they . This type of modeling led to dramatic increases in they -production overall, and increases were most robust for participants who reported higher familiarity. Overall, this research illustrates that characteristics tied to social experience, modeling, and visual cues to an individual's gender identity are highly informative for the production of singular specific they . More broadly, we illustrate that language-processing costs related to language production can be boosted for users and therefore can intervene in the likelihood of misgendering.

  PublisherDOI

• How We See It: Culturally Different Eye Movement Patterns Over Visual Scenes

  2023-05-31 · 8 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  It is blatantly obvious that culture is a powerful predictor of variance in overt human behavior. The foods we eat and the manner in which they are prepared, the holidays that we celebrate, and the languages that we speak are all strongly influenced by our cultural background. Culturally influenced behaviors like these seem to arise from a combination of conscious choices and environmental exposure. As such, cross-cultural differences in human behavior may be fairly superficial, overlaid onto underlyingly similar cognitive and perceptual processes. Alternatively, it is possible that our cultural backgrounds impact our cognition and perception at a more fundamental level. In this chapter, we explore the possibility that culture impacts basic aspects of visual perception.

  PublisherDOI

• Lexically Independent Structural Priming in Second Language Online Sentence Comprehension

  Language Learning · 2023-06-04 · 6 citations

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  Abstract This study examined structural priming during online second language (L2) comprehension. In two self‐paced reading experiments, 64 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English as a foreign language read coordinated noun phrases where the conjuncts had either the same structure or different structures. Experiment 1 showed that the second conjunct was read faster when it had the same structure as the first. This effect occurred for the structurally marked adjective phrases (e.g., a simple to grasp problem ) but only showed a numerical trend for the less marked relative clauses (e.g., a problem that was simple to grasp ). Experiment 2 compared unmarked adjective phrases and relative clauses (e.g., a simple problem vs. a problem that was simple ) and found significant priming for both. Together, the two experiments showed that L2 comprehension priming could occur without repetition of the lexical head. Moreover, this priming was susceptible to inverse frequency effects, with the less frequent structure exhibiting greater priming.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Lexical Ambiguity

  2023-08-21

  reference-entry1st authorCorresponding

  A lexical ambiguity, or homonym, is a string of sounds (in spoken language) or a string of characters (in written language) that corresponds to more than one word and/or meaning. Homophones sound the same, but may be spelled differently (e.g., I, eye, aye). Homographs are spelled the same, but may be pronounced differently (e.g., tear: as in tear in my eye or tear the paper). Many words are both homophonous and homographic (e.g., bank, bark). The word bat is both semantically ambiguous (it can refer to a flying animal or a piece of sports equipment) and syntactically ambiguous (it can be either a noun or a verb, as in bat her eyes). If the lexical alternatives differ in frequency, the most frequent one is called the dominant meaning and less frequent alternatives are called subordinate meanings. In order to understand a sentence containing an ambiguous word (e.g., The bat flew through the air), one must resolve both the meaning and syntactic form of the word, relying on some combination of context and frequency. In this example, the preceding determiner the rules out a verb meaning of bat, but two noun meanings are possible. In the absence of any richer context, a reader could choose the most frequent meaning or rely on the relative plausibility of the two types of bats flying through the air. Ambiguous words often appear in sentences that either disambiguate the word fully or strongly bias one particular meaning, but even in these cases, the word is considered lexically ambiguous. Researchers usually make a distinction between words with unrelated meanings, as in the examples above, and words with two or more related meanings (e.g., newspaper: as in work at the newspaper or read the newspaper.) The latter type are considered polysemous rather than lexically ambiguous. This distinction has proven useful, but is somewhat fraught because the distinction between related and unrelated meanings is ill-defined. Finally, most research on lexical ambiguity focuses on ambiguities within a language, but interlingual homographs can also be found, in which words with the same spelling, but different meanings, occur across languages. For example, coin occurs in both English and French, but means “corner” in French.

  PublisherDOI

• What do we learn when we adapt to reading regional constructions?

  PLoS ONE · 2023-04-07 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  We present four experiments investigating adaptation to a regional grammatical structure through reading exposure, using both the needs + past participle construction (e.g., The car needs washed) and the double modal construction (e.g. You might could go there). In each experiment, participants read two stories containing informal dialogue. Half of the participants were exposed to one of the regional constructions and half were not. Those readers exposed to the regional constructions adapted, gradually reading the novel constructions faster over 9 to 15 exemplars. The degree to which the exposed group learned the construction was tested in two ways. In the first two experiments, learning was measured by comparing reading times to acceptable and unacceptable variants of the novel constructions. Readers did not learn either the verb tense rule for the needs construction (Experiment 1) or a simple ordering rule for double modal constructions (Experiment 2). Similarly, in Experiments 3 and 4, metalinguistic judgments used to test learning revealed that participants had failed to acquire the regional grammar of either novel construction. These experiments suggest that the adaptation effects reflect learning some general properties of the experimental stimuli, not learning the syntactic constructions themselves.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Michael K. Tanenhaus

  University of Rochester

  15 shared

• Susan M. Garnsey

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  14 shared

• Greg N. Carlson

  11 shared

• Robin M. Queen

  Virginia Tech

  10 shared

• Min Wang

  6 shared

• Wei Hang

  Chinese Academy of Forestry

  5 shared

• Kevin B. McGowan

  5 shared

• Fang Yuan

  4 shared

Labs

• U-M LSA LinguisticsPI