Andreas Brocher

I am a third year Ph.D. student in the Linguistics Department at the University at Buffalo where I am also a teacher of German at various levels. I received my master's degree (actually my Magister Artium) in linguistics, German literature, and sociology from Humboldt University at Berlin.

Contact Information

	 	
Name: 	Andreas Brocher
 		
Office: 446 Baldy Hall, UB North Campus
 		
Email: 	abrocher@buffalo.edu
 		
Phone: 	716-645-0109
 		
Mail: 	German Department, University at Buffalo, 446 Baldy Hall, Buffalo, NY 14260

Research Interests
I am primarily interested in the question of how the human brain processes language. My current research focuses on (a) the processing and (b) the mental representation of lexically ambiguous words. I am particularly interested in the retrieval and mental representation of homonyms and polysemes like bank and paper. Working in the Psycholinguistics Lab together with Gail Mauner and Jean-Pierre Koenig I tackle my research questions conducting various reaction time experiments and manipulate meaning frequency and meaning relatedness (among other factors). In addition, I conduct eye-tracking experiments in a project together with Stephani Foraker from Buffalo State College. We monitor eye-fixations while participants read locally ambiguous sentences and need to resolve the ambiguity in later sentence regions. Finally, I approach lexical ambiguity resolution by measuring evoked potentials. Together with Kristi Buckley from the CDS department at UB I measure event-related potentials while participants retrieve homonyms and polysemes in sentence context. We focus on the N400 component and its distribution across ambiguity type and sentence region. I also use homonyms for investigating the negative compatibility effect observed in literature on perception. Researchers in the field have found that negative priming (i.e. inhibition) obtains when visual stimuli are presented subliminally and additionally backward masked. I have been able to show that the negative compatibility effect is not restricted to low level perceptual stimuli like arrows and squares but can be extended to language processing. Finally, I am interested in metaphor comprehension, especially in the comprehension and mental representation of spatial dimensional adjectives like high and deep as well as their figurative distribution in language. It seems to me that this rather small class of adjectives affects our understanding of and behavior in the non-concrete world quite a bit.

Talks and Posters
The paper for my talk at the Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference on Consciousness 2012 in Boston is here.
The abstract for my poster presentation at CUNY 2012 in New York City is here. The poster can be accessed here.
The manuscript for my poster presentation at AMLaP 2011 in Paris is here. The poster can be accessed here.

Teaching

	
Fall 2008, 2009, and 2010: 	German 101

Spring 2009, 2010, and 2011: 	German 102

Summer School 2009, 2010: 	FUBiS Terms I + II

Summer 2011: 			IIK Düsseldorf

Personal
When I am not on campus, in the library, or staring at my computer screen at home, I enjoy sports and food (in that order). I am also very much into traveling even though my time and budget do not allow for too much of this pleasure.