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« Semantics Reading Group | Main | Intricate Grammar Yields Precise Understanding»

Colin Phillips Colloquium

Colin Phillips
University of Maryland

How is Grammar so Fast?

Friday, March 10, 3:30 pm, Machmer W-26

Abstract

In this talk I will be concerned with how much of what a speaker knows about his language can be put to use very quickly, and with the mechanisms that make it possible to achieve this. I will begin with examples of how the parser is able to preserve incrementality and grammatical accuracy, even in situations where word order makes this difficult. The primary evidence for this will be drawn from comparative studies of language comprehension in Japanese and English. Both English and Japanese show a clear locality bias in the processing of long-distance dependencies, but this bias has strikingly different consequences in the two languages. I will then discuss the role of predictive mechanisms in making incremental, accurate parsing possible, drawing on comparative studies of Japanese and Chinese and on electrophysiological studies of English and Hindi.