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Psycholinguistics

researcher with child

Our research aims to develop realistic models of how comprehension and production interact in adult language processing and of how children acquire language.

Research

The Stanford Department of Linguistics has an energetic community of researchers in psycholinguistics.  Our faculty and students collaborate to investigate the mechanisms and representations that underlie language production and comprehension in adults and children.  Much of our work is highly interdisciplinary, spanning many areas of the cognitive sciences, including the effects of probabilistic information, memory, and attention on language production and comprehension across a variety of languages.  Our research is heavily theory-driven, and is centered on a shared view of language, as used and understood by humans in a social world.

As examples of ongoing projects in adult processing, we investigate the underpinnings of a particular choice among alternatives when there is more than one way to convey the same information; the effects of phonetic variation in speech on the perception, recognition, and representation of spoken words; the processing of literal and non-literal meaning in spoken and written language; and understanding uncertainty in interpretation (vagueness, ambiguity, etc.).  Examples of ongoing projects in acquisition include investigations of timing in turn-taking, the interpretation of presupposition triggers, the production of complements, and relations between adult verb uses and children’s acquisition of verb forms.

Community

We have a lively psycholinguistics community, with a large number of events that create opportunities for collaboration and cross-disciplinary discourse.  Regular event series such as the Cognition and Language Workshop (sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology), the Developmental Brownbag (Department of Psychology), and the Phonetics-Phonology Workshop (Department of Linguistics) include talks from members of our broad community, and also serve as venues for interacting with leading researchers invited from all over the world.

Ongoing Labwork

The interActive Language Processing (ALPS) Lab

People in this subfield

Upcoming Events

April
11
Date
Fri April 11th 2025, 3:00pm - 4:20pm
Location:
Margaret Jacks Hall, Greenberg Room (Room 126)
Speaker
Gregory Scontras