Susan E. Brennan

 

Associate Professor, Departments of Psychology and Computer Science

Associated, Department of Linguistics

Editorial Board, Psychological Science, Discourse Processes


 

Department of Psychology

Telephone: (631) 632-9145

S.U.N.Y. at Stony Brook

Fax: (631-632-7876

Stony Brook, NY 11794-2500

Email: susan “dot” brennan "at" sunysb “dot” edu


 

Adaptive Spoken Dialog Project

Shared Gaze Project

Gesture Focus Group



I am a cognitive scientist who studies the psychology of language use—in particular, interactive spoken dialogue. I am interested in how people adapt their speaking and understanding to their conversational partners and to the variation that is rampant in speech.  Some of my current studies use eye-tracking, either as a measure of language processing or as a mode of communication.  I also study the human use of technology, especially speech and language interfaces to computers. Long, long ago, I developed a computational model of caricature.


TEACHING


EDUCATION


EXPERIENCE


PUBLICATIONS

  1. Kraljic, T, Samuel, A. G., & Brennan, S. E. (Accepted pending revisions). First impressions and last resorts: How listeners adjust to speaker variability.  Psychological Science.
  2. Kraljic, T, Brennan, S. E. & Samuel, A. G. (In press). Accommodating Variation: Dialects, Idiolects, and Speech Processing. Cognition.
  3. Ekeocha J. O., & Brennan, S. E. (In press, manuscript version).  Collaborative recall in face-to-face and electronic groups.  Memory. 
  4. Stent, A., Huffman, M. K. & Brennan, S. E.  (In press, uncorrected proofs).  Adapting speaking after misrecognition: A study of hyperarticulation.  Speech Communication.
  5. Brennan, S. E., Chen, X., Dickinson, C., Neider, M., &  Zelinsky, G. (2007; In press). Coordinating cognition: The costs and benefits of shared gaze during collaborative search.  Cognition. 
  6. Hanna, J. E. & Brennan, S. E. (2007; In press).  Speakers' eye gaze disambiguates referring expressions early during face-to-face conversation. Journal of Memory and Language.
  7. Brennan, S. E., Mueller, K., Zelinsky, G., Ramakrishnan, I.V., Warren, D. S., & Kaufman, A. (2006).  Toward a Multi-Analyst, Collaborative Framework for Visual Analytics.  IEEE Symposium on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST 2006).  Baltimore, MD.
  8. Brennan, S. E., & Lockridge, C. B. (2006).  Computer-mediated communication: A cognitive science approach.  In K. Brown (Ed.), ELL2, Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd Edition (pp. 775-780).  Oxford, UK: Elsevier Ltd.
  9. Kraljic, T., & Brennan, S. E.   (2005).  Using prosody and optional words to disambiguate utterances: For the speaker or for the addressee? Cognitive Psychology, 50, 194-231.
  10. Brennan, S. E. (2005). How conversation is shaped by visual and spoken evidence.  In J. Trueswell & M. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Approaches to studying world-situated language use: Bridging the language-as-product and language-action traditions (pp. 95-129).  Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  11. Stein, R. & Brennan, S. E. (2004).  Another person's eye gaze as a cue in solving programming problems.  Proceedings, ICMI 2004, Sixth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (pp. 9-15), Penn State University, State College, PA.
  12. Brennan, S. E. & Metzing, C. A. (2004).  Two steps forward, one step back: Partner-specific effects in a psychology of dialogue.  Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 27.
  13. Metzing, C. & Brennan, S. E.  (2003).  When conceptual pacts are broken: Partner-specific effects in the comprehension of referring expressionsJournal of Memory and Language, 49, 201-213.
  14. Schober, M. F., & Brennan, S. E. (2003).  Processes of interactive spoken discourse: The role of the partner.  In A. C. Graesser, M. A. Gernsbacher, & S. R. Goldman (Eds.), Handbook of discourse processes (pp. 123-164).  Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  15. Lockridge, C. B., & Brennan, S. E.  (2002).  Addressees’_needs influence speakers’ early syntactic choicesPsychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9, 550-557.
  16. Brennan, S. E. (2002).  Visual co-presence, coordination signals, and partner effects in spontaneous spoken discourse.  Journal of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, 9, 7-25.
  17. Kraut, R. E., Fussell, S. R., Brennan, S. E.,  & Siegel, J. (2002). Understanding effects of proximity on collaboration: Implications for technologies to support remote collaborative work. In P. Hinds & S. Kiesler, Distributed work (pp. 137-162). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  18. Brennan, S. E., & Schober, M. F.   (2001).  How listeners compensate for disfluencies in spontaneous speech. Journal of Memory