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Now you say it, now you don’t

Colin Phillipps

University of Oxford

Dewey Hall 1-101 Auditorium

35 years ago, I arrived in Rochester knowing very little about linguistics and never having heard of language science. Within just a few weeks in September 1990, what I saw in Rochester changed the course of my career. I was excited by the possibilities that I saw for how to embed linguistic analysis in a cognitive science of language. I have been pursuing some version of that problem ever since, though it has taken me in directions that I could not have imagined. In this talk I will discuss the current status of efforts to link high level linguistic theories with accounts of real-time language processing, focusing on cases where real-time processes appear to violate linguistic constraints. I will pay particular attention to a series of surprising contrasts between comprehension and production. It is widely assumed that comprehension is more successful than production, but we keep finding the opposite.