Achievement

For our IGERT we proposed to develop the new area of 'Processing Linguistics' in which methods of linguistic analysis -- normally applied to problems concerning the grammaticality of linguistic expressions -- are extended so they can be applied to problems in the cognitive processing of language. In collaboration with ex-IGERT trainee Prof. Matthew Goldrick and technical staff member Dr. Donald Mathis, core faculty member Paul Smolensky has extended to language processing the primary analytical concepts of a grammatical framework (Optimality Theory) that he and Alan Prince developed within theoretical linguistics. These concepts define a theory of phonological production, embodied within a computational model, that explains a core set of basic empirical findings concerning errors and reaction times in psycholinguistics.