Theories all the way down

Theories all the way down

“Don’t you have anything positive to say?” Well, as it happens I do! It can be found in a new paper by myself, Phoebe Gaston, Nick Huang, and Hanna Muller, “Theories all the way down: remarks on ‘theoretical’ and ‘experimental’ linguistics.” The question above came...
Making stuff up as you go along. Selectively.

Making stuff up as you go along. Selectively.

When you talk do you just make stuff up as you go along, or do you plan ahead? And what does your grammar have to say about that? Three new findings about planning ahead while speaking tell a surprisingly consistent story. They take us from a long-standing worry about...
Predicting and learning

Predicting and learning

If I’m hurriedly packing to go home to Blighty for a few days, I’ll likely pull out a raincoat. It’s a safe bet, right? But if I have a little more time on my hands, I might look up the detailed forecast, and find that it’s more likely to snow (a rare event in the...
Slow is good

Slow is good

The best things in life take time. That’s what we’ve been seeing again and again as we dig into the way that we pull information from memory during language processing. Three new papers show this in quite different ways. Back in the day, I was enamored of showing that...
New paper on anaphora and parsing

New paper on anaphora and parsing

Our first foray into open access publishing with Frontiers is now complete. Wow — that was fast! Our paper on constraints on anaphora in parsing, led by Wing Yee Chow and Shevaun Lewis, was submitted at the start of April, went through 2 rounds of review and...