Linguistics Seminar Talk - Colin Phillips

Title:  Exceeds expectations: Why speakers (and learners) do better than you’d think

Abstract 

In recent years, especially as our group has dug more into researching language production, we have repeatedly encountered situations where speakers were more fluent and less vulnerable to misleading linguistic material than we had expected. We tend to think of speaking as being harder than understanding. But we keep finding that speakers outperform listeners. In tracking down the causes of this we have also been realizing that models of language processing that give a central role to expectations might not fare so well as we once thought. In some cases we also find that learners who we expected to struggle actually turn out to perform rather well. Our current best guess is that the answer lies in narrowing the specific part of the structure generation pipeline that is most vulnerable.