With Jay McClelland, Elman developed the TRACE model of speech perception in the mid-80s. TRACE remains a highly influential model that has stimulated a large body of empirical research.


In 1990, he introduced the simple recurrent neural network (SRNN; aka 'Elman network'), which is a widely used recurrent neural network that is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli. Elman nets are used in a number of fields, including cognitive science, psychology, economics and physics, among many others.


In 1996, he co-authored (with Annette Karmiloff-Smith, Elizabeth Bates, Mark H. Johnson, Domenico Parisi, and Kim Plunkett), the book "Rethinking Innateness", which argues against a strong nativist (innate) view of development.


Elman was an Inaugural Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, and also was its President, from 1999-2000. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the New Bulgarian University, and was the 2007 recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science. He was founding Co-Director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at UC San Diego, and holds the Chancellor's Associates Endowed Chair. He was Dean of Social Sciences at UCSD from 2008 until June 2014. Elman was also a founding co-director of the UCSD Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute, announced March 1, 2018.


Suzy J. Styles is a psychologist with Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. Her research is in the area of psycholinguistics and cognitive approaches to language acquisition. She is the director of the Brain, Language and Intersensory Perception Lab at NTU.


In 2017 she and Nora Turoman published a paper in "Royal Society Open Science" that found that research subjects could guess the sounds represented by letters from unfamiliar alphabets better than would be expected from simple chance indicating the possibility of an innate ability to understand writing.


Li is also President-Elect of the "Society for Computers in Psychology" and one of the four chief editors of ", Cambridge University Press".


Linda B. Smith is a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Indiana University. Smith earned her Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania.


Smith is the author (or co-author) of more than 100 publications on cognitive and linguistic development in young children.


With Esther Thelen, she co-authored the books "A Dynamic Systems Approach to Development" (Smith & Thelen 1993) and "A Dynamic Systems Approach to the Development of Cognition and Action" (Thelen & Smith 1994), which look at development from a dynamic systems perspective.


She is also well known for her research on the shape bias (Landau et al. 1988), children's tendency to generalize new concrete nouns on the basis of the shape of the object to which they refer.


In 1997, she received the Tracy Sonneborn Award, Indiana University's highest award to its faculty. In 2007, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2013 she received the Rumelhart Prize from the Cognitive Science Society. In 2019, she received the Norman Anderson Lifetime Achievement Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists. Smith is also a member of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society.


Janet Dean Fodor (born 1942) is distinguished professor of linguistics at the City University of New York. Her primary field is psycholinguistics, and her research interests include human sentence processing, prosody, learnability theory and L1 (first-language) acquisition.


Born Janet Dean, she grew up in England and received her B.A. in 1964 and her M.A. in 1966, both from Oxford University. At Oxford she was a student of the social psychologist Michael Argyle, and their 'equilibrium hypothesis' for nonverbal communication became the basis for affiliative conflict theory: if participants feel the degree of intimacy suggested by a channel of nonverbal communication to be too high, they act to reduce the intimacy conveyed through other channels. She received her Ph.D. in 1970 from MIT, looking at the challenge posed by opaque contexts for semantic compositionality.


In 1988, Fodor founded the CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992. She was President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1997. In 2014, she was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. A volume of papers in her honor, "Explicit and Implicit Prosody in Sentence Processing", was published in 2015.


Fodor supervised 27 dissertations of students from both CUNY and the University of Connecticut. In 2017, she received an honorary doctorate from the Paris Diderot University.


She was married to Jerry Alan Fodor until his death in 2017.


Fodor and Lyn Frazier proposed a new two-stage model of parsing human sentences and the syntactic analysis of these sentences. The first step of this new model is to “assign lexical and phrasal nodes to groups of words within the lexical string that is received”. The second step is to add higher nonterminal nodes and combines these newly created phrases into a sentence. Fodor and Frazier suggest this new method because it can transcend the complexities of language by parsing only a few words at a time. Their model is based on the assumption that initial parsing occurs via the length of the phrase, not the syntactic meaning.


Through a series of sentence analyses, Fodor found that the “WH-trace appears in mental representations of sentence structure, but NP-trace does not”. WH-trace is the placement of interrogative words (who, what, where) in a sentence. Her findings did not support those of McElree, Bever, or MacDonald, but she acknowledges that there are different types of sentences that are going to create linguistic issues that linguists don’t know how to deal with yet. Using this same data, Fodor also finds that passive verbs are more memorable than adjectives during language production.


In this article, Fodor emphasizes the importance of integrating prosody into research on sentence processing. She argues that past research has focused on syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences, but people use prosody when reading, which affects reading comprehension and sentence analysis. She also brings up the idea that people use prosody when writing, not just reading, which further affects sentence production and sentence structure. She blames technology for this new need, largely because of the newfound availability of information.


Building off of the work of her doctoral advisor, Noam Chomsky, Fodor wrote an article on the importance of identifying empty categories in sentence processing. Empty categories can “account for certain regularities of sentence structure”, and attaching it with a previous word or phrase can help determine what it means. Figuring out and understanding the meaning of empty categories requires a linguistic background, but all language-speakers have the ability to use empty categories.


Colin Phillips is a British psycholinguist who is the director of the Maryland Language Science Center at the University of Maryland. He is an elected fellow of the Linguistic Society of America and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He is also a co-editor of the "Annual Review of Linguistics".


Colin Phillips grew up in a rural town in eastern England. He attended Oxford University, where he studied Medieval German literature. He then came to the United States on an exchange scholarship to study at Rochester University for a year, where he became more interested in linguistics. He then attended graduate school at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he planned to study semantics.


Philipps researches language acquisition and language processing. In 1997 he was hired at the University of Delaware as an assistant professor. In 2000 he accepted a position as an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. He was promoted to associate professor in 2002 and full professor in 2008. He became the founding director of the Maryland Language Science Center in 2013.


He has been co-editor of the "Annual Review of Linguistics" with Mark Y. Liberman since 2021.


The Linguistic Society of America elected him as a fellow in 2018.


In 2020 he was elected as a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.


During his study-abroad year at Rochester University he met his future wife, Andrea Zukowski. They have one child. In 2016 he and Zukowski founded College Park parkrun, a series of free running events in their area.


Helen J. Neville (May 20, 1946 – October 12, 2018) was a Canadian psychologist and neuroscientist known internationally for her research in the field of human brain development.


Neville received a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, an M.A. from Simon Fraser University, and a Ph.D. from Cornell University, and she also completed a postdoctoral fellowship in neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego. She has been employed as Director of the Laboratory for Neuropsychology at the Salk Institute and as a professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD before joining the faculty at the University of Oregon in 1995, where she remained.


Neville was the Robert and Beverly Lewis Endowed Chair and Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Director of the Brain Development Lab, and Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oregon.


Neville died on October 12, 2018 at the age of 72.


Neville studied in cerebral specialization, neuroplasticity of the brain in childhood and adulthood, the roles of biological constraints and experience, and neurolinguistics. In order to investigate these topics, Neville used a variety of methods, including behavioral measures, event-related potentials (ERPs), and structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Neville's research has helped to distinguish between the brain systems and functions that are largely fixed from those which are modifiable by experience, and with all her work she aimed to make a positive, tangible difference in society. She was involved in a number of outreach programs and charities in addition to scientific research.


Neville has been published extensively, in journals including "Nature", "Nature Neuroscience", "Journal of Neuroscience", "Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience", "Cerebral Cortex" and "Brain Research".


Recent topics of research she has been involved in include the neural mechanisms of grammar acquisition in adults, attentional control mechanisms as they relate to working memory, as well as various types of attention and learning mechanisms in young children.


Neville and the Brain Development Lab were also responsible for creating "Changing Brains", a program of video segments aimed at non-scientists to describe what research has revealed the effects of experience on human brain development. The series aims to inform parents, teachers and policymakers on how to help children develop to their full potential. Neurologist Oliver Sacks said the program was "...fascinating and very original in form and presentation — and exactly the way to present (brain) science to non-scientists."


She is the author of the book "Temperament tools: working with your child's inborn traits" (1998)


Neville has won grants from the U.S. Department of Education and National Institutes of Health for her work in neurocognitive development. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a fellow of the American Psychological Society and Society of Experimental Psychologists. In 2013, she received the William James Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science. Other awards that she received for her work in psychology are listed below:


Ursula Bellugi (born February 21, 1931 in Jena, Germany) is a Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. She is also adjunct professor at the University of California San Diego and San Diego State University and an Associate with the Sloan Center for Theoretical Neurobiology. Broadly stated, she conducts research on the biological bases of language. More specifically, she has studied the neurological bases of American Sign Language extensively, and her work has led to the discovery that the left hemisphere of the human brain becomes specialized for language, whether spoken or signed, a striking demonstration of neuronal plasticity.


She has also investigated the language abilities of individuals with Williams Syndrome, a puzzling genetically based disorder that leaves language, facial recognition and social skills remarkably well-preserved in contrast to severe inadequacy in other cognitive aptitudes. The search for the underlying biological basis for this disorder is providing new opportunities for understanding how brain structure and function relate to cognitive capabilities.


Bellugi received a B.A. from Antioch College in 1952 and an Ed.D. from Harvard University in 1967. Since then, she has held positions as a tenure-track professor at the Salk Institute (1970 forward) and as an adjunct professor at the University of California, San Diego (1977 forward) and San Diego State University (1995 forward).


Bellugi is the daughter of mathematician and optical engineer Maximilian Herzberger. A lot of her research was conducted in collaboration with her husband Edward Klima, a linguist who also specialized in the study of American Sign Language.


Martin Dimond Stewart Braine (June 3, 1926 – April 6, 1996) was a cognitive psychologist known for his research on the development of language and reasoning. He was Professor of Psychology at New York University at the time of his death.


Braine was well known for his research on mental logic."" He theorized that people naturally make deductive inferences based on their knowledge of natural language terms like "if," "all", "any", and "not." Such terms are understood through an intuitive logic that supports commonsense reasoning, but may also produce reasoning fallacies or errors. This natural mental logic was viewed as distinct from the standard logic of mathematicians and philosophers in terms of the inferences it licensed. In contrast to Philip Johnson-Laird and others who suggested that people rely on mental models as opposed to logic when reasoning, Braine took the position that people rely on both mental logic and mental models, with the former closely tied to processes of linguistic comprehension.


Braine edited the volumes "Categories and Processes in Language Acquisition" by Yonata Levy and Izchak Schlesinger, and "Mental Logic" with David O'Brien.


Braine was born in Kuala Lumpur on June 3, 1926. He was the son of Edith Braine, a teacher, and Charles Dimond Conway Braine, a civil engineer. His younger brother was the British philosopher David Dimond Conway Braine.


Braine received his B.S. degree in mechanical engineering in 1946 at University of Birmingham in England. He subsequently attended the University of London where he received a B.S. in Psychology. In London he attended lectures by Jean Piaget, which influenced his later research on the development of logical reasoning.


Braine continued his education at New York University where he received his Ph.D. in Psychology in 1957 under the supervision of Elsa Robinson. Braine worked at SUNY Downstate Medical Center and later at Walker Reed Army Medical Center as a researcher before joining the faculty of the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1965. Braine moved to New York University in 1971 where he remained for the duration of his career.


Braine married Lila (Rosensveig) Ghent in 1960. Lila Braine was a Professor of Psychology at Barnard College, Columbia University. They had a son Jonathan in 1961 and a daughter Naomi in 1964. Braine died of cancer in New York City on April 6, 1996.


Braine conducted research on child language development and engaged in the empiricism-nativism debate. Prior to Noam Chomsky's arguments for innate linguistic universals, there was a strong belief that the structures of language were learned from the input. Braine offered a compromise position that language acquisition was a process of mapping utterances onto a syntax of thought, supported by semantic primitives and a mental logic.


Braine proposed that when learning language, young children use "limited scope" formula to produce their first word combinations, with each formula consisting of a relational term with a slot to be filled (e.g. "all gone ____"). Braine's view that toddlers learn the combinatorial properties of words on an item-by-item basis paved the way for usage-based, lexicalist approaches to grammatical development. Other work focused on learners' acquisition of grammatical gender categories and their reliance on probabilistic cues to acquire grammatical structure. Braine's research emphasized how linguistic patterns are discovered and strengthened through use and repetition.


Duane Girard Watson (born 1976) is an American neuroscientist and Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. He holds the Frank W. Mayborn Chair in Cognitive Science and leads the Vanderbilt University Communication and Language Laboratory.


Watson is from Las Vegas. Watson studied psychology at Princeton University. He originally intended to be a physician, but a class on linguistics made him change course. He graduated in 1998 and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Here he joined the laboratory of Ted Gibson in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2002 Watson earned his doctoral degree. His research considered intonational phrasing (that is, sections of spoken text with a particular intonation patterns) in language comprehension. Watson was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Rochester, where he worked with Michael Tanenhaus.


In 2016 Watson joined Vanderbilt University, where he leads the Communication and Language Laboratory (CaLL). CaLL investigate prosody, the patterns and rhythm of spoken word, individual differences in language processing and how language is produced.


Watson was appointed Director of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society in 2019. He serves as Associate Editor of the . Watson founded the SPARK society, an organisation that looks to support scientists of colour to become innovators in cognitive science. He was promoted to Frank W. Mayborn Chair in 2020.


Elena Lieven (born 18 August 1947) is a British psychology and linguistics researcher and educator. She was a Senior Research Scientist in the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology in Leipzig, Germany. She is also a professor in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Manchester where she is Director of its Child Study Centre and leads the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD).


Elena Lieven is the sister of Anatol Lieven, Dominic Lieven, Michael Lieven, and Nathalie Lieven. Ancestors include Dorothea von Lieven and


Christoph von Lieven, prominent members of Baltic German nobility.


Lieven attended More House School in London, graduating in 1963, then studying at City of Westminster College in London. She studied experimental psychology during her undergraduate years at New Hall, Cambridge University, earning honors, and then studied language development during her doctoral studies at Cambridge.


After Cambridge, Lieven moved to the University of Manchester.


She was Editor of the "Journal of Child Language" for nearly ten years (1996–2005).


Her principal areas of research involve: usage-based approaches to language development; the emergence and construction of grammar; the relationship between input characteristics and the process of language development; and variation in children's communicative environments. She has been involved in the design and collection of naturalistic child language corpora initially funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and, more recently, has collected a number of dense databases funded by the Max Planck Institute.


Lieven was previously the president of the International Association for the Study of Child Language. Also, she is a member of The Chintang and Puma Documentation Project, a DOBES project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation aiming at the linguistic and ethnographic description of two endangered Sino-Tibetan languages of Nepal.


She has also been the director of the Child Study Centre; Centre lead for the Centre for Developmental Science and Disorders in the Institute of Brain, Behaviour and Mental Health; Director of the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development (LuCiD) which was established jointly by the University of Manchester, University of Liverpool and University of Lancaster in 2014 on a five-year grant.


She has been designated an honorary professor at the University of Leipzig, and she has been a guest researcher at numerous universities, including the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, the Netherlands; University of Barcelona, University of California, Berkeley, US; and La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia]].


In July 2018 Lieven was elected Fellow of the British Academy (FBA).


Susan E. Carey (born 1942) is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition and children's development of concepts and is known for introducing the concept of fast mapping, whereby children learn the meanings of words after a single exposure. Her research focuses on analyzing philosophical concepts, and conceptual changes in science over time. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates.


Carey was born in 1942 to William and Mary Carey. She received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1964, a Fulbright scholarship to study in University of London in 1965, and her PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard University in 1971.


She was employed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1972 to 1996 in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She was an assistant professor from 1972-1977, an associate professor from 1977 to 1984, and a full professor from 1984 to 1996. She was a professor at New York University in the department of psychology from 1996 to 2001. In 2001 she joined the faculty at Harvard University.


Susan Carey and Elsa Bartlett coined the term "fast mapping" in 1978. This term refers to the hypothesized mental process where a new concept is learned based only on a single exposure. In 1985 Carey wrote "Conceptual Change in Childhood", a book about the cognitive differences between children and adults. It is a case study about children's acquisition of biological knowledge and analyzes the ways the knowledge is restructured during development. The book reconciles Jean Piaget's work on animism with later work on children's knowledge of biological concepts.


On returning to Harvard, Carey began working alongside Elizabeth Spelke, and they started the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Carey also studied alongside George Miller, Jerome Butler, and Roger Brown. She conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Carey coined the term "Quinian bootstrapping", a theory that people build complex concepts out of simple ones.


In 2009 Carey wrote "The Origin of Concepts", which shows the basis of development of cognitive science. The book won the 2010 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award of the American Psychological Association.


Carey has served on editorial boards for the Psychological Review, Psychological Science, Journal of Acquisition, and Development Psychology.


Carey is married to the professor of philosophy Ned Block (NYU).


Carey received the Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind in 1998. In 2009 she was the first woman to receive the David E. Rumelhart Prize for significant contributions to the theoretical foundation of human cognition.


Carey is a member of the American Philosophical Society, National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine, and the British Academy.


She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001. She is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.


Susan Carey has received the following fellowships: Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1976-1978), Sloan Fellow (1980-1981), Institute for Advanced Studies fellow in the Behavioral Sciences (1984-1985), Cattell Fellowship (1995-1996), George A Miller Lecturer for the Society of Cognitive Neuroscience,(1998), Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), National Academy of Education (1999), Society for Experimental Psychology (1999), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), William James Fellow Award, American Psychology Society (2002); The British Academy Corresponding Fellow (2007), Ottawa Township High School Hall of Fame (2009), Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association (2009), and Cognitive Development Society Book Award (2001)


Frank Smith (1928-2020) was a Canadian psycholinguist recognized for his contributions in linguistics and cognitive psychology. He was an essential contributor to research on the nature of the reading process together with researchers such as George Armitage Miller, Kenneth S. Goodman, Paul A. Kolers, Jane W. Torrey, Jane Mackworth, Richard Venezky, Robert Calfee, and Julian Hochberg. Smith and Goodman are founders of whole language approach for reading instruction. He was the author of numerous books.


Frank Smith was born in England in 1928 and lived on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. He started out as reporter and editor for several media publications in Europe and Australia before commencing undergraduate studies at the University of Western Australia. He received a PhD in Psycholinguistics from Harvard University in 1967.


Smith held positions as professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education for twelve years, professor of Language in Education at the University of Victoria, British Columbia as well as professor and department-head of Applied English Language Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. Before taking the position at the Ontario Institute, Smith briefly worked at the Southwest Regional Laboratory in Los Alamitos, California.


He died on December 29, 2020 in Victoria, B.C.


Smith's research made important contributions to the development of reading theory. His book "Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read" is regarded as a fundamental text in the development of the now discredited whole language movement. Amongst others, Smith's research and writings in psycholinguistics inspired cognitive psychologists Keith Stanovich and Richard West's research into the role of context in reading.


Smith's work, in particular "Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read", is a synthesis of psycholinguistic and cognitive psychology research applied to reading. Working from diverse perspectives, Frank Smith and Kenneth S. Goodman developed the theory of a unified single reading process that comprises an interaction between reader, text and language. On the whole, Smith's writing challenges conventional teaching and diverts from popular assumptions about reading.


Apart from his research in language, his research interests included the psychological, social and cultural consequences of human technology.


Smith advocated the concept that "children learn to read by reading". In 1975 he participated in a television documentary filmed by Stephen Rose for the BBC "Horizon" TV series while based at the Toronto Institute for Studies in Education. The programme focused on his work with a single -year-old child called Matthew.


He was against the 1970s idea that children should first learn the letters and letter combinations that convey the English language's forty-four sounds (Clymer's 45 phonic generalizations) and then they can read whole words by decoding them from their component phonemes. This "sounding out" words is a phonics, rather than a whole language, technique which is rooted in intellectual independence. The whole-language theory explained reading as a "language experience," where the reader interacts with the text/content and this in turn facilitates the link - "knowledge" - between the text and meaning. The emphasis is on the process or comprehension of the text.


Lise Menn (née Lise J. Waldman, born December 28, 1941, in Philadelphia) is an American linguist who specializes in psycholinguistics, including the study of language acquisition and aphasia. She is currently Professor Emerita of linguistics and was a fellow of the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder in Boulder, Colorado until her retirement in 2007.


Menn earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1962 from Swarthmore College and a master's degree (also in mathematics) from Brandeis University in 1964. After changing fields, she earned a master's and doctorate in linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1975–6.


She taught or conducted research at several universities in the Boston area, including a post-doctoral position at MIT under Paula Menyuk and Kenneth N. Stevens, several years as a research associate with Jean Berko Gleason, and six years at the Aphasia Research Center of the Boston University School of Medicine under Harold Goodglass. She also spent a post-doctoral year with Eran Zaidel at UCLA, before being appointed associate professor of linguistics at the University of Colorado in 1986. Her approaches to linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics are considered to be 'bottom-up' (i.e. data-driven), empiricist, and functionalist.


She has been a member of the governing committees of the Academy of Aphasia, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Linguistics and Language Sciences section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2006, she was honored as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America.


, Dr. Menn has written or edited nine books, and more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. Her doctoral advisees and co-advisees include Marjorie Perlman Lorch, Rebecca Burns-Hoffmann, Kevin Markey, Andrea Feldman, Patrick Juola, Harold Wilcox, Debra Biasca, Valerie Wallace, Carolyn J. Buck-Gengler, and Holly Krech Thomas.


Dr. Menn was married to William Bright from 1986 until his death in 2006. Her first husband was Michael D. Menn; they were divorced in 1972. She is the mother of Stephen Menn and Joseph Menn and stepmother of Susie Bright.


Winfred Philip Lehmann (June 23, 1916August 1, 2007) was an American linguist who specialized in historical, Germanic, and Indo-European linguistics. He was for many years a professor and head of departments for linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin, and served as president of both the Linguistic Society of America and the Modern Language Association. Lehmann was also a pioneer in machine translation. He lectured a large number of future scholars at Austin, and was the author of several influential works on linguistics.


Winfred P. Lehmann was born in Surprise, Nebraska on June 23, 1916, the son of the Lutheran minister Philipp Ludwig Lehmann and Elenore Friederike Grosnick. The family was German American and spoke German at home. They moved to Wisconsin while Lehmann was a boy.


After graduating from high school, Lehmann studied German and classical philology at Northwestern College, where he received his BA in humanities in 1936. He subsequently enrolled at the University of Wisconsin. At Wisconsin, Lehmann specialized in phonetics and Indo-European and Germanic philology. He studied a variety of topics, including the works of John Milton and Homer, German literature, and became proficient in a diverse number of languages, including Old Church Slavonic, Lithuanian, Old Irish, Sanskrit and Old Persian. His command of languages would eventually extend to Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Turkish, and several branches of the Indo-European languages, including Celtic, Germanic, Italic, Balto-Slavic, Hellenic, Anatolian and Indo-Iranian.


From 1942 to 1946, Lehmann served in the Signal Corps of the United States Army. During World War II he was an instructor in Japanese for the United States Army, and eventually became officer-in-charge of the Japanese Language School. The administrative experience and knowledge of non-Indo-European languages that he acquired during the war would have a major impact on his later career.


Since 1946, Lehmann taught at Washington University in St. Louis, where served as Instructor (1946) and Assistant Professor (1946–1949) in German. Wishing to focus more on linguistics and philology rather than only the German language, he arranged with Leonard Bloomfield to spend the summer at Yale University to catch up with advances in linguistics during the war, but these plans came to nothing after Bloomfield suffered a debilitating stroke.


In 1949, Lehmann transferred to the University of Texas at Austin, which at the time had about 12,000 students and was known for its strength in philology and for its university library. He subsequently served as Associate Professor (1949–1951) and Professor (1951–1962) of Germanic Languages at University of Texas at Austin. During this time Lehmann published his influential work "Proto-Indo-European Phonology" (1952).


Since 1953, Lehmann served as Chairman of the Department of Germanic Languages (1953–1964), Acting Chairman of the Department of Slavic Languages (1960–1965). In 1963 he was made Ashbel Smith Professor of Linguistics and Germanic Linguistics (1963–1983). The Ashbel Smith professorship accorded him twice the salary of an ordinary professor. In 1964, Lehmann became the founding Chairman of the Department of Linguistics (1964–1972).


Lehmann was well known for his teaching style, and notably encouraged his students to seek to understand his lectures rather than just simply writing them down. Instead of only grading his students' papers and exams, he would give them detailed evaluations of their performance, and encouraged them to pursue and develop ideas. Lehmann strongly encouraged his students to seek having their works published in academic journals.


Under the leadership of Lehmann, the departments for Germanic languages and linguistics at University of Texas at Austin both became among the top five graduate programs in North America, which they remained for 25 years. Almost ten percent of all PhDs awarded in linguistics in the United States during this time came from the University of Texas at Austin. He supervised more than fifty PhDs and mentored hundreds of students, many of whom would acquire prominent positions in their respective fields.


Combined with his teaching and administrative duties, Lehmann was engaged with research and writing. His "Historical Linguistics: An Introduction" (1962) has been translated into Japanese, German, Spanish and Italian, and remains a standard work on historical linguistics. He edited the "Reader in Ninetenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics" (1967), which remains a standard work on both Indo-European, historical, and comparative linguistics. His "Proto-Indo-European Syntax" (1974) was hailed as breakthrough by linguist Robert J. Jeffers, who reviewed it in the journal "Language". "Studies in Descriptive and Historical Linguistics", a festschrift in Lehmann's honor, was published in 1977 under the editorship of Paul Hopper. His influential "Syntactic Typology" was published in 1981.


In 1983, Lehmann was made Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor in the Humanities at University of Texas at Austin. He received the Harry H. Ransom Award for Teaching Excellence in the Liberal Arts in 1983, which he would describe as the greatest honor of his career. In 1984, together with fellow researcher Jonathan Slocum, Lehmann developed a groundbreaking prototype computer program for language translation, which the LRC put into commercial production for Siemens.


Lehmann retired as Louann and Larry Temple Centennial Professor Emeritus in the Humanities in 1986. Although having retired from teaching, he was still very active as a researcher at the Linguistics Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and continued to write books and articles. In 1986 Lehmann founded the journal "Computers and Translation", now "Machine Translation", of which he was the founding editor. His "Gothic Etymological Dictionary" (1986) has been described as the best work ever published on Germanic etymology. He received the Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1987.


Notable works authored by Lehmann during his final years include the third edition of "Historical Linguistics" (1992) and "Theoretical Bases of Indo-European Linguistics" (1993). "Language Change and Typological Variation", a second festschrift in his honor, was published by the Institute for the Study of Man in 1999 under the editorship of Edgar C. Polomé and Carol F. Justus. Lehmann completed his final monograph, "Pre-Indo-European" (2002), at the age of 86.


Lehmann was preceded in death by his wife Ruth and his son Terry, and died in Austin, Texas on August 1, 2007.


Throughout his career, Lehmann wrote more than fifty books and special issues of journals, and over 250 articles and more than 140 reviews. These works covered a diverse set of topics, including Middle High German literature, Japanese grammar, Old Irish, Biblical Hebrew, and textbooks on the German language. His contributions to the fields of Indo-European, Germanic and historical linguistics, and machine translation, have been significant, and several of his works on these subjects have remained standard texts up to the present day. He is remembered for his crucial role in establishing the University of Texas at Austin as one of America's leading institutions in linguistics, and for the large numbers of students that he taught and mentored, many of whom have made major contributions to scholarship.


Lehmann married Ruth Preston Miller on October 12, 1940, whom he met while studying at the University of Wisconsin. A specialist in Celtic linguistics and Old English, Ruth was Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. Winfred and Ruth had two children, Terry Jon and Sandra Jean.


Winfred and Ruth were both environmentalists and loved animals. They donated of land in the northwest of Travis County, Texas to The Nature Conservancy to create the Ruth Lehmann Memorial Tract. The family inhabited a spacious house on Lake Travis, where they cared for rescued animals.


Aside from linguistics and the environment, Lehmann's great passion was literature, particularly early Germanic literature and the novels of his friend Raja Rao and James Joyce. He was also a skilled pianist. Lehmann was a close friend of John Archibald Wheeler, with whom he shared an interest for literature. Despite his wide circle of friends, Lehmann was nevertheless a very private man.


Brian J. Byrne (born 1942) is an Australian social scientist specializing in applied and psycholinguistics, an emeritus professor at the University of New England in Australia, and lead author of publications and articles on research in his field. Byrne was a lead researcher in the 10-year-long, $5 million National Institutes of Health study by an international team of scientists into the development of reading ability in 1,000 pairs of twins. Beginning in 2000, the study found that genetics were more important influences on reading development than environmental factors. In 2012, Byrne was appointed a lead researcher in a similar Australian study of twins.


In 2008, the researchers published the results of their research, finding that genetic factors were more influential than environmental ones in the development of reading ability in children. Byrne cautioned, however, that, "Intensive and well-designed classroom and preschool interventions can make a difference for struggling readers." Byrne was subsequently selected in 2012 as lead researcher for a follow-on study of 2,000 twins listed in the National Literacy and Numeracy Assessment.


Trevor Harley is emeritus chair of Cognitive Psychology His primary research is in the psychology of language. From 2003 until 2016 he was Head and Dean of the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee, Scotland, United Kingdom. He is author of "The Psychology of Language", currently in its fourth edition, published by Psychology Press, and "Talking the talk", a book about the psychology of language (psycholinguistics) aimed at a more general audience.


Trevor Harley was born in 1958 in London and grew up near Southampton. He was educated at Price's Grammar School, Fareham. His undergraduate degree was in Natural Sciences at St John's College in the University of Cambridge. He stayed at Cambridge to study for his PhD under the supervision of Brian Butterworth. His PhD was on "Slips of the tongue and what they tell us about speech production".


For his PhD and later research he collected a corpus of several thousand naturally occurring speech errors, and focused on one word substitutes for another (e.g. saying "pass the pepper" instead of "pass the salt"). He concluded that speech production is an interactive, parallel process, leading him to an interest in connectionist modeling, and research on computational modeling, ageing, and metacognition.


After his PhD he took a temporary lectureship at the University of Dundee. He then moved to the University of Warwick, where he stayed until 1996, then moving to a Senior Lectureship at Dundee. He was awarded a personal chair in 2003, and became Head of Department in the same year, and later Dean in 2006.


In addition to his academic work, he is an author of a novel, "Dirty old rascal" (), a fantasy about a cook set in the strange Castle where no misdeed goes unpunished. Harley has published an article, "Why the earth is almost flat: Imaging and the death of cognitive psychology". He has recently performed as a stand-up comic, performing at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2013.


Harley's current main research interest is in metacognition, this interest grew out of his research on ageing and his interest in consciousness. More topics about his research on metacognition is covered in his forthcoming book, "Cognition: The mindful brain - why we behave as we do".


Another of his research interest includes how we produce language, although he now studies this in the wider context of how we represent meaning, how language is affected by brain damage, and by normal and pathological ageing (e.g. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases). He also works on how we control our own cognition, and how this ability changes with age. Underlying all his research is a belief that the mind is a parallel, interactive computer, best studied by experimentation and computational modeling. As well as his interest in language and computational modeling, he was also interested in the research of ageing and metacognition.


He is also interested in the weather, and maintains a site about severe weather events in Britain and the British weather in general available from trevorharley.com, calling this role as a "psychometeorologist". He also carries out psychological research about the weather, including why are people so interested in the weather? He maintains a weather station at Lundie near Dundee.


He wrote a famous article called Promises, Promises in which he argued that cognitive neuropsychologists have increasingly deviated from the original goals and methods of the subject.


One of Harley's most famous publications is the book "The Psychology of Language". In this book, he discusses psycholinguistics, which is the study of relationships that exist between linguistic behaviour and psychological processes. Harley discusses both the low cognitive level processes, including speech and visual word recognition, and the high cognitive level processes that are involved in comprehension. The text covers recent connectionist models of language, describing complex ideas in a clear and approachable manner. Following a strong developmental theme, the text describes how children acquire language (sometimes more than one), and also how they learn to read.


Drew Westen is professor in the Departments of Psychology and Psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia; the founder of Westen Strategies, LLC, a strategic messaging consulting firm to nonprofits and political organizations; and a writer. He is also co-founder, with Joel Weinberger, of Implicit Strategies, a market research firm that measures consumers' unconscious responses to advertising and brands.


He grew up in North Carolina and Georgia, and received a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University, a Master of Arts in Social and Political Thought from the University of Sussex (England), and a Doctor of Philosophy in clinical psychology from the University of Michigan, where he taught introductory psychology from 1985 to 1991.


Westen is a strategic messaging consultant for major nonprofit organizations and has been a consultant or advisor to progressive and Democratic organizations, including the House and Senate Democratic Caucuses.


In addition, Westen is a commentator on television, radio, in print, and online, who has been a frequent contributor to the opinion page of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN.com and the Huffington Post. His 2011 article on Obama's leadership in the Sunday New York Times was one of the most widely read pieces in the history of the Sunday Times and drew considerable attention, including from the White House. The President and his close advisors were so incensed and concerned about its impact, because it captured popular opinion at the time about his leadership style, that they sent out a thirty-plus page email of talking points to friendly journalists to use when he was interviewed on television and radio.


At Harvard University and at Emory, Westen's work has focused on alternative ways of assessing and classifying personality disorders and developing and refining the Shedler-Westen Assessment Procedure as a tool for researchers and clinicians to help further the understanding of personality and its disorders. He is unusual among academic clinical psychologists in being both an active researcher and a practicing clinician for 20 years, who has written on what can be learned from both science and practice. This is reflected in over a decade's work on how to revise the diagnostic manual in psychiatry so that it is useful both to clinicians and researchers.


Much of Westen's theoretical work has attempted to bridge perspectives, particularly cognitive, psychodynamic, and evolutionary. He has published over 200 research papers in the scientific literature.


In January 2006 a group of scientists led by Westen announced at the annual Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference in Palm Springs, California the results of a study in which functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that self-described Democrats and Republicans responded to negative remarks about their political candidate of choice in systematically biased ways.


Subjects were then presented with information that exonerated their candidate of choice. When this occurred, areas of the brain involved in reward (notably dopamine-rich regions such as the striatum / nucleus accumbens) showed increased activity, essentially reinforcing both their positive feelings toward their favored candidate and defensive reasoning.


The study was published in the "Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience" 18:11, pp. 1947–58, a peer-reviewed scientific journal.


In 2007, PublicAffairs published Westen's "The Political Brain." The book has been widely used by political candidates and leaders around the world and is credited as having influenced campaign strategies in a number of races, beginning with the 2008 Presidential race. President Bill Clinton described it as one of the most significant books in politics he had read in a decade.


He is divorced and has two children.


(Maria) Fernanda Ferreira (born 22 September 1960) is a cognitive psychologist known for empirical investigations in psycholinguistics and language processing. Ferreira is Professor of Psychology and the Principal investigator of the Ferreira Lab at University of California, Davis.


In 1995, Ferreira was awarded the Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology for cognition and human learning by the American Psychological Association. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (FRSE).


Ferreira received her BA (Honours) in Psychology from the University of Manitoba in 1982. She went on to complete postgraduate work at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, obtaining degrees in Linguistics (MA 1986) and Psychology (MS 1985, PhD 1988). At U Mass Amherst. Ferreira worked under the supervision of Charles (Chuck) Clifton, Jr investigating relationships between syntactic processing and phonology. Her dissertation, "Planning and Timing in Sentence Production: The Syntax-to-Phonology Conversion," provided evidence that phonological structures and representations, rather than syntactic structures, impact the timing of sentence-level speech.


Ferreira served as Programme Director for Linguistics for the National Science Foundation from 1996-1997. From 2004 until 2006, Ferreira was the Director of the Center for the Integrated Study of Vision and Language at Michigan State University. She was Chair of Language and Cognition and Professor in Psychology at the University of Edinburgh from 2006 until 2010.


Ferreira is an editor of "Collabra: Psychology", an open access psychology journal published by the University of California Press. She is also an associate editor of the journal "Cognitive Psychology". She previously served as an associate editor of the "Journal of Experimental Psychology" (1997–2000) and the "Journal of Memory and Language" (2001–2004).


Ferreira was born in Portugal, and raised in Manitoba, Canada. She is married to John Henderson, a frequent collaborator and fellow professor at the University of California, Davis. They met whilst they both read at University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Her younger brother, Victor Ferreira, is also a psycholinguist, and a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego.


Judith F. Kroll is a Distinguished Professor of Language Science at University of California, Irvine. She specializes in psycholinguistics, focusing on second language acquisition and bilingual language processing. With Randi Martin and Suparna Rajaram, Kroll co-founded the organization Women in Cognitive Science in 2001. She is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American Psychological Association (APA), the Psychonomic Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and the Association for Psychological Science (APS).


Kroll's research program examines the cognitive processes underlying bilingualism. Her research has been supported by The National Science Foundation (NSF) and The National Institutes of Health (NIH). With Annette de Groot, she co-edited the "Handbook of Bilingualism: Psycholinguistic Approaches." In 2013, Kroll was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to conduct research exploring how learning a second language and becoming a bilingual person impacts processing of one's native language.


One of Kroll's research foci has to do with language selection in bilingual speech. She discovered that when one language is spoken, both languages are active.


Roger William Brown (April 14, 1925 – December 11, 1997) was an American psychologist. He was known for his work in social psychology and in children's language development.


Brown taught at Harvard University from 1952 until 1957 and from 1962 until 1994, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1957 until 1962. His scholarly books include "Words and Things: An Introduction to Language" (1958), "Social Psychology" (1965), "Psycholinguistics" (1970), "A First Language: The Early Stages" (1973), and "Social Psychology: The Second Edition" (1985). He authored numerous journal articles and book chapters.


He was the doctoral adviser or a post-doctoral mentor of many researchers in child language development and psycholinguistics, including Jean Berko Gleason, Susan Ervin-Tripp, Camile Hanlon, Dan Slobin, Ursula Bellugi, Courtney Cazden, Richard F. Cromer, David McNeill, Eric Lenneberg, Colin Fraser, Eleanor Rosch (Heider), Melissa Bowerman, Steven Pinker, Kenji Hakuta, Jill de Villiers, and Peter de Villiers. A "Review of General Psychology" survey, published in 2002, ranked Brown as the 34th-most cited psychologist of the 20th century.


Born in Detroit, Brown earned an undergraduate psychology degree in 1948 and a Ph.D. in 1952 from the University of Michigan. He started his career in 1952 as an instructor and then assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University. In 1957 he left Harvard for an associate professorship at MIT, and became a full professor of psychology there in 1960. In 1962, he returned to Harvard as a full professor, and served as chair of the Department of Social Relations from 1967 to 1970. From 1974 until his retirement in 1994, he held the title of John Lindsley Professor of Psychology in Memory of William James.


Roger Brown's research and teaching focused on social psychology, the relationship between language and thought, and the linguistic development of children. The clarity, directness, and humor of his scholarly writing are often praised; Pinker describes him as "perhaps the best writer in psychology since James himself".


Brown's book "Words and Things: An Introduction to Language" (1957) examines the mutual influence of thought and language, described as "the first book on the psychology of language coming out of the cognitive revolution". His writing in this area became an inspiration for much work in the relation between language and cognition, including Eleanor Rosch (Heider)'s work on color names and color memory and Steven Pinker's 1994 book "The Language Instinct".


Brown taught social psychology and published his first textbook, "Social Psychology", in 1965. The book was completely rewritten and published in 1986 as "Social Psychology: The Second Edition". Brown also wrote an introductory textbook on psychology, co-authored with his colleague Richard Herrnstein. Pinker noted that these two books "live in publishing infamy as a lesson of what happens to textbooks that are unconventional, sophisticated, and thought-provoking: they don't sell."


Other important works by Brown include his 1976 paper on "Flashbulb Memories", concerning people's memories of what they were doing at the time they heard about major traumatic events such as the JFK assassination. The breadth of his interests is seen in the papers reprinted in his 1970 book "Psycholinguistics", which includes work with David McNeill on the 'tip of the tongue state', a study with Albert Gilman of the social factors involved in choosing familiar versus polite second-person pronouns ("tu, vous") in languages like French and Spanish, and a review of the novel "Lolita" by Harvard colleague Vladimir Nabokov.


Brown was known for the grace with which he treated and referred to his colleagues, whether junior or senior. An example of this is found in his brief autobiography: "Jerome Bruner, then as now, had the gift of providing intellectual stimulus, but also the rarer gift of giving his colleagues the strong sense that psychological problems of great antiquity were on the verge of solution that afternoon by the group there assembled."


Linguistic Determinism and the Part of Speech (1957)


In his “How Shall a Thing Be Called?” article, Brown wrote about how objects have many names, but often share a common name. He proposed the frequency-brevity principle, by which he theorized that children use words that are shorter in length because shorter words are more common for objects in the English language—for example, referring to a dog as "dog" and not "animal". He elaborated on the frequency-brevity principle and how it may be violated (for example, referring to a pineapple as "pineapple" and not "fruit"). He further argued that children progress from concrete naming to more abstract categorizations as they age.


The Pronouns of Power and Solidarity (1960)


The Tip of The Tongue Phenomenon (1966)


To test the Tip of the Tongue phenomenon empirically, Brown and David McNeill conducted a study in which they asked participants to look over a list of words and definitions and then listen to the definition one of the words on the list. Those in the “tip of the tongue” state were asked to fill out a chart assessing the related words that they are able to come up with. Brown and McNeill were able to identify two types of recall: abstract and partial, that participants exhibited when attempting to remember the target words. Abstract recall relies on the number of syllables in the target word or the location of stressed syllables in the word while partial recall relies on the number of letters the target word.


Brown was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1966–67. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1963) and the National Academy of Sciences (1972). In 1971 he received the Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award of the American Psychological Association, in 1973, the G. Stanley Hall Prize in Developmental Psychology of the American Association, and in 1984, the Fyssen International Prize in Cognitive Science. He also was awarded several honorary doctorates.


Roger Brown was born in Detroit, one of four brothers. His family, like many others, was hit hard by the Depression. He attended Detroit public schools, and began undergraduate studies at the University of Michigan, but World War II interrupted his education. He joined the Navy during his freshman year, and was accepted into the V-12 program, which included midshipman training at Columbia University, and served as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. During his time in the navy, he became interested in psychology. With the help of the GI BIll, he completed his university education after the war. Brown became a dedicated opera fan, with a particular admiration for Metropolitan Opera soprano Renata Scotto.


Lila Gleitman (born December 10, 1929) is a professor emerita of psychology and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. She is an internationally renowned expert on language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on children's learning of their first language. Gleitman's research interests include, Language acquisition, morphology and syntactic structure, Psycholinguistics, syntax, and construction of the lexicon. Notable former students include Elissa Newport, Barbara Landau, and Susan Goldin-Meadow.


She was married to fellow psychologist Henry Gleitman, who was also a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, until his death on September 2, 2015.


Gleitman received a B.A. in literature from Antioch College in 1952, an M.A. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1962, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1967. She was employed as an assistant professor at Swarthmore College before accepting a position as the William T. Carter Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1973, and then subsequently serving as a professor of linguistics and as the Steven and Marcia Roth Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania from 1973 until her retirement.


The impact of Gleitman's research in language acquisition has been recognized by numerous organizations, and she has been elected as a fellow in the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. She won the David Rumelhart Prize in 2017 and also served as President of the Linguistic Society of America in 1993.


Gleitman herself describes her linguistic interests on the member page for the National Academy of Sciences below:


"One of my main interests concerns the architecture and semantic content of the mental lexicon, i.e., the psychological representation of the forms and meanings of words. My second major interest is in how children acquire both the lexicon and the syntactic structure of the native tongue."


Charles Perfetti is the director of, and Senior Scientist for, the Learning and Research Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh. His research is centered on the cognitive science of language and reading processes, including but not limited to lower- and higher-level lexical and syntactic processes and the nature of reading proficiency. He conducts cognitive behavioral studies involving ERP, fMRI and MEG imaging techniques. His goal is to develop a richer understanding of how language is processed in the brain.


This experiment was performed on twenty-one graduates from the University of Pittsburgh who were native Chinese speakers. Participants had to perform a written sentence task where they would read a sentence that interrupted the approved continuation with a relative clause. The results of what was called the norming study revealed that approval of subject verb-object continuations were high both subject extracted and object extracted clauses. Participants read experimental sentences that contain one of the two types of relative clauses. One version of experimental sentences was read within a session and the other version was read between five and ten minutes later. An electroencephalogram recording was collected for each participant who read a sentence in Chinese.


For the lexical decision task, greater activation was found in the character-writing condition more than the pinyin-writing condition. The areas of the brain that were activated are the bilateral superior parietal lobules and the inferior parietal and postcentral gyrus. The results suggest that the identifying of learned characters in the character-writing training condition promoted activation of components used for the previous training exercise before. When activation was greater in the character-writing condition for the pinyin-writing condition than the character-writing condition, it existed in the right inferior frontal gyrus. There was also activation found in the bilateral middle occipital gyri, precuneus, and left temporal gyrus for learned characters than novel characters.


In exploring the Lexical Quality Hypothesis Charles Perfetti focuses on analyzing the brain’s fundamentals of being able to read. In "Reading Ability: Lexical Quality to comprehension", Perfetti states, that differences in characteristics of word comprehension impacts reading ability and comprehension. High-lexical qualities partly involve the spelling of a word as well as the manipulation of meaning about a word which allows meaning retrieval at a rapid pace. However, low quality representations of a word promote word-related difficulties in comprehension of a text. His first set of results reveals that comprehension depends on lexical skill and describes the disconnections that focus specifically on comprehension skills. As for word linguistic processing, studies reveal skill difference are found in through the analysis of confusing word meanings.


The Event Related Potentials performed on rare vocabulary meaning unveil how skilled readers acquire words better and reveal stronger ERP indications of word learning. In addition, these results propose that there are skill differences in understanding the orthographic representation of a word. ERP results also show that there are skill differences in comprehending and processing of ordinary words. Finally, they demonstrate problems for low-skilled readers with interpreting words with prior text. In doing so, Perfetti provides findings that suggest word-knowledge impacts the processing of word meaning and comprehension.


For several semesters, Perfetti tested 800 psychology students over the course of several semesters. The students were given reading task to assess their levels of spelling, word sounding and comprehension skills. His claim was that the rate at which words are experienced and reading skill administers a readers experience with words. He found out that by making sure participants knew both meanings of homophone pairs, achievement of skilled and less skilled readers could be assessed. Furthermore, educating participants on lower exposed members of homophones can reverse the confusion of comprehension to the point that they become higher frequency words.


The results showed faster reaction times for learned and familiar words than that of unlearned and rare words while the response times for correct decisions were faster than incorrect decisions. There was a significant main effect for word type, but not for word type x relatedness. This kind of word type revealed how learners were faster at responding to related trials in the orthography-to-meaning and phonology trials. The interaction for word type x correctness revealed a difference in decision times. This was found in the orthography-to-meaning and phonology-to-meaning conditions for familiar words. The results conclude that reinforcing the words orthography might help readers recognize a word in future encounters which will influence the process of incremental learning.


John L. Locke is an American biolinguist who has contributed to the understanding of language development and the evolution of language. His work has focused on how language emerges in the social context of interaction between infants, children and caregivers, how speech and language disorders can shed light on the normal developmental process and vice versa, how brain and cognitive science can help illuminate language capability and learning, and on how the special life history of humans offers perspectives on why humans are so much more intensely social and vocally communicative than their primate relatives. In recent time he has authored widely accessible volumes designed for the general public on the nature of human communication and its origins.


Locke has studied and worked in the United States and the United Kingdom. He received a B. A. in speech communication from Ripon College in 1963, and both an M. A. and a Ph.D. in speech pathology, audiology and speech science from Ohio University in 1965 and 1968 respectively. He went on to postdoctoral fellowships in psychology at Yale University and Oxford University in the United Kingdom (UK) from 1972-74.


He is currently a Professor of Language Science at Lehman College, the City University of New York. He has previously been on the faculty at the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, Harvard University, and at the University of Sheffield, and Cambridge University in the UK.


Locke’s research has been funded by a wide variety of sources including the National Institutes of Health, the Axe-Houghton Foundation, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, the March of Dimes, the Cape Branch Foundation, and the Commonwealth Fund. He has held significant roles in the American Speech. Language, and Hearing Association, the Linguistic Society of America, and the Society for Research in Child Development.


He has been honored as a recipient of the Science Award from Ohio University (2002) and the Faculty Recognition Award for Research and Scholarship from Lehman College (2009).


He was a founding editor of the journal Applied Psycholinguistics, and has served on numerous other editorial boards. His administrative roles have included: Director of the Interdepartmental Program in Linguistics, Lehman College, City University of New York (2003–2007), Head of the Department of Human Communication Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England (1995—1998), Founding Director and Senior Research Scientist, Neurolinguistics Laboratory, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts (1984–1995), Director and Professor, Graduate Program in Communication Sciences and Disorders, MGH Institute of Health Professions (1983–1995), Director and Professor, Linguistic Institute, University of Maryland, College Park (1982), and Director, Speech and Hearing Laboratory, Institute for Child Behavior and Development, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1969–1980).


Locke is the author of two volumes that have played central roles in the understanding of child language development in a biological context, the first focused on the development of phonological capabilities, which Locke views as greatly under-emphasized in the study of the emergence of human language, and the second a far-ranging synthesis of evidence related to the acquisition of language. These works have been cited hundreds of times in the scientific literature, and have influenced works related specifically to phonological development, to language development in general, to language evolution, and to broad topics on developmental theory.


He has recently authored two additional volumes directing attention to the significance of speech communication in the modern world, (reviewed by, among others, the New York Times and the Washington Times) and to eavesdropping and gender differences in understanding of human communication and the human condition.


Maryellen MacDonald is Donald P. Hayes Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She specializes in psycholinguistics, focusing specifically on the relationship between language comprehension and production and the role of working memory. MacDonald received a Ph.D. from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1986. She is a Fellow member of the Cognitive Science Society. She is married to fellow psychologist Mark Seidenberg and has two children.


Glenn David McNeill (born 1933 in California, United States) is an American psychologist and writer specializing in scientific research into psycholinguistics and especially the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that accompany discourse.


David McNeill is a professor of the University of Chicago in Illinois, and a writer.


McNeill studied for and was awarded a Bachelor of Arts in 1953 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1962, both in psychology, at the University of California, Berkeley. He went on to study at the Center for Cognitive Studies, Harvard University in 1963.


As well as being a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi and holding several academic fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973-1974, McNeill was Gustaf Stern Lecturer at the University of Göteborg, Sweden in 1999; and Vice President of the International Society for Gesture Studies from 2002–2005.


In 1995, McNeill won the Award for Outstanding Faculty Achievement, University of Chicago; and in 1995 he was awarded the Gordon J. Laing Award from the University of Chicago Press for the book "Hand and Mind".


In 2004, the National-Louis University (a multi-campus institution in Chicago) Office of Institutional Management Grants Center received an American Psychological Association Grant for Gale Stam Psychology College of Arts and Sciences to provide "a Festschrift conference honoring Professor David McNeill of the University of Chicago."


McNeill specializes in psycholinguistics, and in particular scientific research into the relationship of language to thought, and the gestures that accompany discourse.


In his research, McNeill has studied videoed discourses of the same stimulus stories being retold "together with their co-occurring spontaneous gestures" by "speakers of different languages, [...] by non-native speakers at different stages of learning English, by children at various ages, by adolescent deaf children not exposed to language models, and by speakers with neurological impairments (aphasic, right hemisphere damaged, and split-brain patients)."


This and other research has formed the subject matter of a number of books which McNeill has written through his career.


Research on the psychology of language and gesture.


The "growth point" is a key theoretical concept in McNeill's approach to psycholinguistics and is central to his work on gestures, specifically those spontaneous and unwitting hand movements that regularly accompany informal speech. The growth point, or GP, posits that gestures and speech are unified and need to be considered jointly. For McNeill, gestures are in effect (or, McNeill would say, in reality) the speaker's thought in action, and integral components of speech, not merely accompaniments or additions. Much evidence supports this idea, but its full implications have not always been recognized.


Speech and gesture, taken together, comprise minimal units of human linguistic cognition. Following Lev Vygotsky in defining a "unit" as the smallest package that retains the quality of being a whole, in this case the whole of a gesture-language unity, McNeill calls the minimal psychological unit a Growth Point because it is meant to be the initial pulse of thinking-for-(and while)-speaking, out of which a dynamic process of organization emerges. The linguistic component of speech categorizes the visual and actional imagery of the gesture; the imagery of the gesture grounds the linguistic categories in a visual spatial frame.


McNeill furthers this conception of the material carrier by turning to Maurice Merleau-Ponty for insight into the duality of gesture and language. Gesture, the instantaneous, global, nonconventional component, is "not an external accompaniment" of speech, which is the sequential, analytic, combinatoric component; it is not a "representation" of meaning, but instead meaning "inhabits" it. Merleau-Ponty links gesture and existential significance:


The link between the word and its living meaning is not an external accompaniment to intellectual processes, the meaning inhabits the word, and language 'is not an external accompaniment to intellectual processes'. We are therefore led to recognize a gestural or existential significance to speech. … Language certainly has inner content, but this is not self-subsistent and self-conscious thought. What then does language express, if it does not express thoughts? It presents or rather it "is" the subject’s taking up of a position in the world of his meanings. [emphasis in the original]


To make a gesture, from this perspective, is to bring thought into existence on a concrete plane, just as writing out a word can have a similar effect. The greater the felt departure of the thought from the immediate context, the more likely is its materialization in a gesture, because of this contribution to being. Conversely, when "newsworthiness" is minimal materialization diminishes and in some cases disappears, even though a GP is active; in these cases gestures may cease while (empty) speech continues, or vice versa, speech ceases and a vague gesture takes place. Thus, gestures are more or less elaborated and GPs more or less materialized depending on the importance of material realization to the "existence" of the thought.


Mead's Loop and the mirror neuron "twist" would be naturally selected in scenarios where sensing one's own actions as social is advantageous. For example, in imparting information to infants, where it gives the adult the sense of being an instructor as opposed to being just a doer with an onlooker, as is the case with chimpanzees. Entire cultural practices of childrearing depend upon this sense. Self-awareness as an agent is necessary for this advantage to take hold. For Mead's Loop to have been selected the adult must be sensitive to her own gestures as social actions.


McNeill's books have received coverage in a number of academic journals and in the general press.


A 1991 article in the "Chicago Reader"; a 2006 article in the "Scientific American, Mind" magazine; and a 2008 article in "Boston Globe" describe McNeill's work on the language of gesture in detail.


"The Acquisition of Language" was reviewed in the "International Journal of Language & Communication Disorders" in 1971.


"The Conceptual Basis of Language" was reviewed in "The Conceptual Basis of Language" in 1980.


"Hand and Mind" was reviewed in "Language and Speech"; the "American Journal of Psychology"; and "Language" in 1994.


"Gesture and Thought" was reviewed in "Language in Society" and "Metaphor and Symbol" in 2007.


Aniruddh (Ani) D. Patel is a cognitive psychologist known for his research on music cognition and the cognitive neuroscience of music. He is Professor of Psychology at Tufts University. From a background in evolutionary biology, his work includes empirical research, theoretical studies, brain imaging techniques, and acoustical analysis applied to areas such as cognitive musicology (how humans process music), parallel relationships between music and language, and evolutionary musicology (cross-species comparisons). Patel received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 to support his work on the evolution of musical cognition.


Patel received the Deems Taylor Award from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and the Music Has Power Award from the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function for his 2008 book, "Music, Language and the Brain." Oliver Sacks considered "Music, Language, and the Brain" "a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists." Josh McDermott, head of MIT's Laboratory for Computational Audition, found Patel's focus on the syntax of music and language with its potential for revelations into similarities in their underlying mechanical operations especially significant. Ray Jackendoff, co-author with Fred Lerdahl of "A Generative Theory of Tonal Music", suggested a cautious approach in distinguishing parallels between music and language without accounting for other cognitive domains that may share such capacities.


Following graduate school, Patel joined The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, CA, under the direction of Gerald Edelman. In 2005, he was appointed the Esther J. Burnham Senior Fellow, and he remained at the Institute until 2012 when he joined Tufts University as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. At Tufts, he is a participating member of the Stibel Dennett Consortium, a faculty group that encourages teaching initiatives and scholarship relating to the brain and cognition. In addition to research and academic activities, Patel is been active in a number of related organizations. From 2009-2011, he was president of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC), an organization dedicated to the study of musical cognition.


Patel is a Fellow at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), a global research organization that recognizes and supports international, innovative, high-impact research. He was named a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies (Social Sciences) for 2018-2019 and was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.


With John Iversen and others, Patel has explored how brain mechanisms perceive and process rhythm as well as the relationship of music and language processing. A 2021 study with J.J. Cannon focuses on how beat anticipation is neurally implemented by processes occurring in the supplementary motor area and the dorsal striatum.


A significant area of interest for Patel concerns communications among and across species, and the evolutionary roots of human language and music. His search for the origins of rhythm (beat) and melody have led to explorations of the vocal and rhythmic behavior of monkeys, birds, and parrots. After failing to find anticipated rhythmic correlational correspondences in chimpanzees, Patel was surprised to learn about Snowball, a cockatoo with a fine sense of rhythm. By 2019, he had not only studied the cockatoo's timing but also the creativity involved in its various moves.


An especially informative video episode is part of a MathScienceMusic series from New York University. Patel provides the Normalized Pairwise Variability Index (nPVI) equation long used by linguists to compare patterns in speech. After establishing stylistic contrasts in stress patterns in French and English spoken language, he applies the formula to musical compositions by native composers of both countries. While strong contrasts are found in the language examples, similar although weaker contrasts are found in the musical excerpts. The strength of this comparison is particularly important because the musical contrasts do not rely on beat, pulse or other characteristic aspects of music that are not found in language. Rather they demonstrate a parallel with the prevalent characteristics of the stressed and unstressed syllables of the spoken language.


Susan Moore Ervin-Tripp (1927–2018) was an American linguist whose psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic research focused on the relation between language use and the development of linguistic forms, especially the developmental changes and structure of interpersonal talk among children.


Born Susan Moore Ervin on June 29, 1927, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she earned her undergraduate degree in Art History at Vassar College. She earned a PhD from the University of Michigan in 1955 for her thesis, entitled "The Verbal Behaviour of Bilinguals: The Effect of Language of Report upon the Thematic Apperception Test Stories of Adult French Bilinguals", under the supervision of Theodore Newcomb. She taught at the University of California at Berkeley. In her academic work she conducted research on child language acquisition and bilingualism among children and has made contributions to the fields of linguistics, psychology, child development, sociology, anthropology, rhetoric, and women's studies.


She was a doctoral advisor of Daniel Kahneman, a 2002 Nobel Prize winner.


Ervin-Tripp was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1974.


A festschrift dedicated to Ervin-Tripp was published in 1996.


A tribute to the work of Susan Ervin-Tripp with a comprehensive bibliography was published by A. Kyratzis in 2020.


Charles Egerton Osgood (20 November 1916 – 15 September 1991) was an American psychologist and professor at the University of Illinois. He was known for his research on behaviourism versus cognitivism, semantics (he introduced the term "semantic differential), cross-culturalism, psycholinguistic theory, and peace studies. He is credited with helping in the early development of psycholinguistics. Charles Osgood was recognized distinguished and highly honored psychologist throughout his career.


Charles Egerton Osgood was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, on 20 November 1916. His father was a manager at the Jordan Marsh department store in Boston. Osgood described having an unhappy childhood as his parents were divorced by the time he was six. When he was ten, his aunt, Grace Osgood, gave him a copy of Roget's "Thesaurus". This gift was described by Osgood an “object of aesthetic pleasure”, sparking his fascination with words and their meanings.


Osgood attended Brookline High School, where he began writing for the school newspaper, and eventually founded a school magazine. Osgood attended Dartmouth College where he intended to graduate and work as a writer for newspapers. During his second year, he enrolled in a class taught by Theodore Karwoski, thus inspiring him to switch his major in order to pursue a degree in psychology.


Charles Osgood earned his B.A. in 1939 from Dartmouth, and in the same year, married Cynthia Luella Thornton. Osgood then went on to study at Yale University where he completed his Ph.D. in 1945. During his time at Yale, he worked as an assistant for Robert Sears, and collaborated with the likes of Arnold Gesell, Walter Miles, Charles Morris, and Irvin Child. However, the person with the greatest influence on his career and future work was Clark Hull. Though Osgood was heavily influenced through working alongside Hull; he stated the experience was one of the determining reasons for him pursuing a career as a researcher, rather than a clinician.


In addition to this,Osgood completed a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University from 1958 to 1959; and was given an honorary doctorate from the Dartmouth College in 1962. Osgood also acted as a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii from 1964 to 1965.


Charles Osgood's career ended somewhat abruptly and prematurely after developing an acute case of Korsakoff's syndrome. He was left with severe anterograde amnesia, but recovered well enough to continue working, though in a much lighter capacity as he was restricted to working from home.


Toward the end of his career, Osgood decided to devote his time to three main projects. With the help of other scholars, Osgood intended on completing the interpretation of data obtained from the cross-cultural project; along with publishing 2 books, one of them, a summary of his theory of psycholinguistics (to be titled "Toward an Abstract Performance Grammar"), and the other on international affairs. Osgood was never able to complete any of these due to the effects of his illness, which, after a few years, forced him into complete retirement, until his death on September 15, 1991.


Osgood worked on many studies mainly on cross-cultural studies in different aspects. He devoted most of his time to studies regarding Social Psychology, Cognitive-Behaviour Psychology and also on Psycholinguistics. He was renowned for four of his major works and these works have pathed the way for future researchers by facilitating them for validating their works with researches tools proposed by Osgood, also promoting international research studies on cross-cultural topics.


Osgood's Mediation theory—The psycholinguistics foundations in human behaviour and communication process.


Osgood proposed the mediation theory which suggested that the physical stimuli exist in our environment have elicited our internal response and lead to our interpretation of the underlined meaning of those presented stimulus. With our 3-level of thought process, we will have our internal stimuli, which are our thoughts and emotion towards the physical stimulus and the internal stimulus will bring up the outward response(s), which are visible feedbacks to the physical stimulus in the environment. Osgood also suggested that by measuring the visible outward response we can determine the intensity of emotion that has been brought up by the physical stimulus.


Osgood also proposed a two-stage Meditation learning theory in the language acquisition process in 1954. The theory suggested that the use of language is an expression of mental process which is related to the cultural context of an individual. It suggested that the language acquisition process involves coding and decoding of the psychological structure within the language. His research in language, cognition, and neurophysiology had provided insight into future studies about multilingual language acquisition with a cross-cultural framework.


Osgood introduced a semantic technique for researchers to measure the connotative meaning of objects and concepts from the human Ecology aspect. The Semantic differential technique focused on three affective dimensions of Evaluation, Potency, and Activity (E-P-A) to evaluate social and cultural related concepts in a valid and reliable way. The practice of the semantic differential technique is being used broadly in social and behavioural science studies.


Development of the atlas of affectivemeanings (1960s–1980s).


To further improve the validity of the semantic differential technique, Osgood took the lead to develop the Atlas of Affective Meanings project from the 1960s to the 1980s. The project is indices of the affective meanings with 20 basic and derived measures of over 600 functionally equivalent concepts by analyzing over 30 language/culture communities from Mexico, Brazil, Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy, Spain, Portugal, France, German, Netherlands, Finland, etc.


With the development of the Atlas, affective meanings are used as universal functional markers with the E-P-A dimension and they have high validity in measuring indigenous and cross-cultural comparisons. These affective meanings are being widely applied on social-cultural studies on social dynamics, international communication, mental illness stigma and connotation of racial concepts, etc. It has a great contribution to the development of cross-cultural researches and also international communications.


Graduated reciprocation in tension reduction (GRIT) strategies.


With the rise of the nuclear arms race that was brought up by the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Osgood proposed the GRIT strategies (Graduated Reciprocation in Tension reduction) in 1962, which means to provide a psychological approach to resolve the tension brought up from the nuclear arm race between the two superpowers. The GRIT strategies are based on the concept of reciprocity and used to rebuild a negotiation platform for two parties who are deadlocked. The introduction of GRIT strategies not only reduced the tension between the two superpowers but also has contributed to solving various social, cultural and political conflicts worldwide.


Charles Osgood earned many distinctions and honors within the field of psychology throughout his distinguished career. In 1960, the American Psychological Association presented Osgood with the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions; three years later, Osgood was elected as president of the American Psychological Association. In addition to this, the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues presented Charles E. Osgood with the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award in 1971. In the following year, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and as president of the Peace Science Society in 1976. Osgood was also the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship twice, in 1955 and again in 1972 in the field of philosophy.


Mervyn Etienne is an English karateka. He is the winner of multiple European Karate Championships and World Karate Championships medals. Since retiring from karate competitions Etienne has become a "cognitive performance coach", physical therapist and co-founder of Bio-Performance Sciences Ltd.


Mark Seidenberg is Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories. He is a specialist in psycholinguistics, focusing specifically on the cognitive and neurological bases of language and reading. Seidenberg received his Ph.D. from Columbia University under the mentorship of Thomas Bever and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Study of Reading at the University of Illinois. He has held academic positions at McGill University, the University of Southern California, and since 2001 at the University of Wisconsin. Seidenberg has published over a hundred scientific articles and is the author of Language at the Speed of Light (2017). Seidenberg is married to fellow psychologist Maryellen MacDonald and has two children.


Herbert Herb Clark (born 1940) is a psycholinguist currently serving as Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. His focuses include cognitive and social processes in language use; interactive processes in conversation, from low-level disfluencies through acts of speaking and understanding to the emergence of discourse; and word meaning and word use. Clark is known for his theory of "common ground": individuals engaged in conversation must share knowledge in order to be understood and have a meaningful conversation (Clark, 1985). Together with Deanna Wilkes-Gibbs (1986), he also developed the collaborative model, a theory for explaining how people in conversation coordinate with one another to determine definite references. Clark's books include "Semantics and Comprehension, Psychology and Language: An Introduction to Psycholinguistics, Arenas of Language Use and Using Language."


Clark, born in 1940, attended Stanford University until 1962 and received a B.A. with distinction. He attended Johns Hopkins University for post-graduate training, where he obtained his MA and his PhD, in 1964 and in 1966 respectively. The same year he finished his PhD, he completed his post-doctoral studies at the Linguistics Institute of UCLA. He has since worked at Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford University.


Clark's early work explored theories of comprehension. He found that people interpret verb phrases, particularly eponymous verb phrases, against a hierarchy of information presumed to be common knowledge between the listener and the speaker. This hierarchy of beliefs is composed of


For example, when a person instructed, “Do a Napoleon for the camera,” the listener would identify Napoleon, recognize acts that were done by Napoleon (such as smiling, saying ‘fromage’, or posing for paintings), and then use the context to identify the act being referred to (tucking one's hand into one's jacket.)


Another important finding by Clark was that salience is necessary for two people to understand exactly what is being referred to. Napoleon did eat and sleep during his lifetime, but saying, “Do a Napoleon at the kitchen table,” to mean “eat” would create comprehension problems, because the salience of the act is limited.


In his study of irony, Clark examined the pretense theory, which states that two speakers in a conversation do not announce the pretense they make when speaking with irony, but do nevertheless expect the listener to see through it. Thus, common ground must be had by both speakers in order for the effect of irony to work.


Irony contains three important features: asymmetry of affect, victims of irony, and ironic tone of voice.


Asymmetry of affect speaks to the higher likelihood of making ironic positive statements (“What a smart idea!” to a bad idea) than ironic negative statements (“What a stupid idea!” to a good one). Since those who are ignorant of irony would be more likely to cling to the general tendency of seeing the world in terms of success and excellence, these are the people that ironists pretend to be.


Victims of irony are the people in conversation presumed not to understand the irony, such as the person that the speaker is pretending to be, or the person that could be the listener who wouldn't understand the irony in the speech.


The ironic tone of voice is the voice a speaker takes on in lieu of his own in order to fully convey the pretense. Ironic tones of voices tend to be exaggerated and caricatured, like taking on a heavily conspiratorial voice when discussing a widely known piece of gossip.


The second way is illustrated in more frequent and general situations where the obstacle isn't well known or specific. So if the speaker were to ask a passing stranger near the arena about the start time of the concert, he might formulate, “Can you tell me when the concert starts?” The expected obstacle is formed by lack of ability and willingness of the stranger to answer the question. It is a useful convention due to how it provides the stranger with a broad range of graceful excuses not to give the desired answer.


The last way of framing to overcome obstacles is for situations where the person being addressed seems unwilling to provide the information. Then the speaker can ask for related information that the addressee is willing to divulge, and the speaker appears polite while the addressee is not being forced to admit unwillingness. Whether the obstacle is being addressed directly or sidestepped, the speaker is still designing requests that best overcome the greatest expected obstacle.


A similar study by the same researchers examined ‘uh’ and ‘um’ in spontaneous speaking. Like and "thuh", "um" and "uh" signal varying degrees of delay, which "um" creating a major pause and "uh" creating a minor one. Because of how they are incorporated into speech, such as specifically put to use at certain pauses in speech, attached as clitics onto other words, and prolonged for additional meaning, they have become a part of spontaneous speech that have meaning. What they argued was that "um" and "uh" are conventional English words and speakers plan for them, formulate them, and produce them just like any other vocabulary.


James Lloyd "Jay" McClelland, FBA (born December 1, 1948) is the Lucie Stern Professor at Stanford University, where he was formerly the chair of the Psychology Department. He is best known for his work on statistical learning and Parallel Distributed Processing, applying connectionist models (or neural networks) to explain cognitive phenomena such as spoken word recognition and visual word recognition. McClelland is to a large extent responsible for the large increase in scientific interest in connectionism in the 1980s.


McClelland was born on December 1, 1948 to Walter Moore and Frances (Shaffer) McClelland. He received a B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University in 1970, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1975. He married Heidi Marsha Feldman on May 6, 1978, and has two daughters.


In 1986 McClelland published "Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition" with David Rumelhart, which some still regard as a bible for cognitive scientists. His present work focuses on learning, memory processes, and psycholinguistics, still within the framework of connectionist models. He is a former chair of the Rumelhart Prize committee, having collaborated with Rumelhart for many years, and himself received the award in 2010 at the Cognitive Science Society Annual Conference in Portland, Oregon.


McClelland and David Rumelhart are known for their debate with Steven Pinker and Alan Prince regarding the necessity of a language-specific learning module.


In fall 2006 McClelland moved to Stanford University from Carnegie Mellon University, where he was a professor of psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. He also holds a part-time appointment as Consulting Professor at the Neuroscience and Aphasia Research Unit (NARU) within the School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester.


In July 2017, McClelland was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.