Stevenson College Winter Faculty Lecture: Matt Wagers: Grammar on the Trailing Edge of the Conscious Present

Stevenson College Winter Faculty Lecture: MATT WAGERS Grammar on the Trailing Edge of the Conscious Present: What We Can Learn about Memory from Language Processing

Language comprehension seems fast, effortless and error-free -- at least, to the extent that we can introspect about it. Underneath this apparently seamless part of our day-to-day experience lies a complex working memory system. To avoid overwhelming our limited processing capacity, information is constantly being shuffled back and forth between states of accessibility and storage, between attention and inattention. As a consequence, linguistic knowledge, richly detailed and precise, must be adapted to a working memory which is rapid and error-prone. How this adaptation can be achieved is revealing, both about how we remember language and about how we forget it.

Sponsored by: Stevenson College, Department of Linguistics, Institute for Humanities Research