Sentence Processing

Language comprehension and production is often fast, accurate and effortless, despite the fact that it requires listeners and speakers to assign rich linguistic representations in a few hundred milliseconds. Psycholinguists at UW Linguistics investigate how language processing mechanisms compute rich syntactic representations in real-time comprehension, and how this process is supported by cognitive mechanisms such as working memory and executive function. One unique feature of the UW sentence processing group is the emphasis on the developmental approach: developmental changes in sentence processing could reveal core properties of adult sentence processing mechanisms that may not be readily observable in adults' efficient processing systems.