Research
Talking is hard!
We sometimes lose sight of how impressive language production really is because we do it all the time. But, being able to rapidly and (in most cases) seamlessly produce a sentence is actually an extremely complicated task!
At the LEMlab, our research focuses on the factors and processes that shape real-time language production and on the way that processes and biases associated with language production can shape the world’s languages. We do this using a range of behavioral methods, from simple online surveys to visual-world eye-tracking techniques.
Language Production in Real Time
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How do we decide what to say – and what not to say – when we’re describing an event to another person? When we’re describing events that we see in the world, we don’t just list the things that we see in front of us; we make choices about what to mention and what to leave out. In this line of research, we investigate the factors that might determine why we might mention one thing and not another. |
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Once we decide what we want to say, there are many ways to convey the same message. What makes us choose one way of saying things over others? Our research on sentence formulation investigates the factors that can explicitly or in-explicitly affect how we choose to say something |
Emergence Of Word Order
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How do languages acquire a word order? Why are some word ordering patterns much more common among the world’s languages than others? This line of research looks at the way that biases in language production could have influenced the emergence of typologically common word orders in the Verb Phrase (e.g., Subj-Obj-Verb and Subj-Verb-Obj) and in the Noun Phrase (e.g., Noun-Adj and Adj-Noun). |