Events & News
Colloquium
| Category | Lecture |
| Date | Friday, October 10, 2008 |
| Time | 12:00 pm |
| Location | GS 906 |
| Details | Cognitive Science Brown Bag |
| Speaker | Colin Phillips |
| Title | Professor |
| Affiliation | Dept of Linguistics, University of Maryland |
How Grammars Leak
Somewhere in the history of (psycho)linguistics real-time sentence parsing gained a reputation for being grammatically imprecise, possibly even uninteresting for the study of speakers linguistic 'competence'. This reputation is undeserved. There are now numerous demonstrations of the precision of the representations built during real-time comprehension. However, our efforts to demonstrate complete grammatical faithfulness in on-line processes have failed: there are a number of cases where speakers appear to be susceptible - at least fleetingly - to 'illusions of grammaticality'. Importantly, however, this fallibility is highly selective. In this talk I will summarize a number of findings from studies of diverse linguistic phenomena in head-initial and head-final languages, and discuss the scope and possible sources of selective fallibility, plus its relation to the question of how structured information is encoded in memory.