The focus of this lab is the study of language. We are interested in many aspects of language. How do children learn to speak? How do adults learn new languages? What exactly is a word, anyway? Sometimes language is thought of in terms of the words that make it up and the grammatical rules for putting them together. There is a lot more to language than that, which is part of why it has been so hard to teach computers to understand language. Here is proof by example: Woman: I'm leaving you. If all you knew were the words "I'm", "leaving", "you", "who", "is" and "he", you would not understand this short dialog taken from Steve Pinker's The Language Instinct. I doubt there are any computer language programs that could make sense of it. Most adults, on the other hand, derive a great deal of information from these two short lines. In studying language, this lab is interested in the neural and mental mechanisms underlying vocabulary and grammar. We are also interested in the interface between vocabulary, grammar, and the rest of the mind. As this website grows, this page will hopefully develop into a comprehensive resource for information about psycholinguistics (the study of the mental processes underlying language). As a start, here are a few blog entires that Josh wrote about aspects of language: The best language site on the Web Why girls say "holded" but boys say "held"
|