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Kutas received a B.A. in 1971 from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. in 1977 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, San Diego in 1980. She then accepted a position as a research neuroscientist in the Department of Neurosciences at UCSD, and she has been a member of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD since its founding in 1988. In 2018 Kutas was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Thomas G. Bever (born December 9, 1939) is a Regent's Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and Neuroscience at the University of Arizona. He has been a leading figure in psycholinguistics, focusing on the cognitive and neurological bases of linguistic universals, among other pursuits. Bever received a B.A. in linguistics and psychology from Harvard University in 1961, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967; he studied with Noam Chomsky, George A. Miller, and Jean Piaget. He taught at Rockefeller University from 1967–1969, Columbia University from 1970–1986 (where he was involved with Project Nim), and the University of Rochester from 1985–1995, before accepting his current position at the University of Arizona, where he has remained ever since.
Bever is notable for his study of garden path sentences such as "The horse raced past the barn fell", as well as his analysis by synthesis model of sentence processing, developed with David Townsend. In recent decades, Bever has studied the differences in language processing between righthanders with familial handedness and righthanders without left-handed relatives.
He was a co-founder of the journal "Cognition".
Petitto's research and discoveries span several scientific disciplines. Her early work with Nim Chimpsky and her later work with humans, encompasses anthropology, comparative ethology, evolutionary biology, cognitive neuroscience, cognitive science, theoretical linguistics, philosophy, psychology, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, child development, evolutionary psychology, American Sign Language, deaf studies, and bilingualism. Her overall discoveries involve:
Advancement of New Discipline: Petitto had an early role in the creation of a new scientific discipline with her colleague and husband Kevin Niall Dunbar, which they termed Educational Neuroscience. Educational Neuroscience is a sister discipline of Cognitive Neuroscience, in which basic neuroscience and behavioral science discoveries about the developing brain and the growing child are joined with their translational implications, towards the ultimate goal of solving core problems in society and the education of young children.
Taken together, Petitto's research discoveries and scientific writings have offered testable hypotheses and theory regarding the neural basis for the brain's specialization for human language, the types of language features a child must minimally be exposed to (and when) in early life (sensitive or critical periods), what happens if early critical periods are missed, and how best to facilitate optimal language learning in all children acquiring all human languages be they signed or spoken.
After her undergraduate work with Nim Chimpsky, Petitto went on to make discoveries about the linguistic structure, acquisition, and representation in the brain of the world's natural signed languages, especially American Sign Language (ASL). Using signed languages as a new "microscope" to discover the central/universal properties of human language in the brain (those that are distinct from the modality of language transmission and reception), Petitto focused on the following lines of research:
Petitto's more recent studies involve the use of a combination of four disciplines:
Petitto is the recipient of over twenty international prizes and awards including,
Michael Tomasello (born January 18, 1950) is an American developmental and comparative psychologist, as well as a linguist. He is professor of psychology at Duke University.
Earning many prizes and awards from the end of the 1990s onward, he is considered one of today's most authoritative developmental and comparative psychologists. He is "one of the few scientists worldwide who is acknowledged as an expert in multiple disciplines". His "pioneering research on the origins of social cognition has led to revolutionary insights in both developmental psychology and primate cognition."
Tomasello was born in Bartow, Florida. He received his bachelor's degree 1972 from Duke University and his doctorate in Experimental Psychology 1980 from University of Georgia.
He was a professor of psychology and anthropology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, US, during the 1980s and 1990s. Subsequently, he moved to Germany to become co-director of Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, and later also honorary professor at University of Leipzig and co-director of the Wolfgang Kohler Primate Research Center. 2016 he became Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Duke University, where he now is James F. Bonk Distinguished Professor.
He works on child language acquisition as a crucially important aspect of the enculturation process. He is a critic of Noam Chomsky's universal grammar, rejecting the idea of an innate universal grammar and instead proposing a functional theory of language development (sometimes called the social-pragmatic theory of language acquisition or usage-based approach to language acquisition) in which children learn linguistic structures through intention-reading and pattern-finding in their discourse interactions with others.
Tomasello also studies broader cognitive skills in a comparative light at the Wolfgang Köhler Primate Research Center in Leipzig. With his research team, he created a set of experimental devices to test toddlers' (from 6 months to 24 months) and apes' spatial, instrumental, and social cognition; the outcome of which is that social (even ultrasocial) cognition is what truly sets human apart.
Uniqueness of human social cognition: broad outlines.
More specifically, Tomasello argues that apes lack a series of skills:
Tomasello sees these skills as being preceded and encompassed by the capacity to share attention and intention (collective intentionality), an evolutionary novelty that would have emerged as a cooperative integrating of apes skills that formerly worked in competition.
The sharing of attention and of intention.
Tomasello's defense, use and deepening of the shared attention and intention hypothesis rely on the experimental data asserted to above (see also). Tomasello also resorts to an evolutionary two-step scenario (see below), and to philosophical concepts borrowed from Paul Grice, John Searle, Margaret Gilbert, Michael Bratman, and anthropologist Dan Sperber.
For Tomasello, this two-step evolutionary path of macro ecological pressures impacting micro-level skills in representation, inferences and self-monitoring, does not hold because natural selection would see internal mechanisms. "Cognitive processes are a product of natural selection, but they are not its target. Indeed, natural selection cannot even "see" cognition; it can only "see" the effects of cognition in organizing and regulating overt actions." Ecological pressures would have put prior cooperative or mutualistic behaviors at such an advantage against competition as to create a new selective pressure favoring new cognitive skills, which would have posed new challenges, in an autocatalytic way.
Echoing the phylogenetic path, humans' unique skills at joint and collective intentionality develop during the individual's lifetime by scaffolding, not only on simple skills like distinguishing animate/inanimate matter, but also on the communicative conventions and institutions forming the socio-cultural environment, forming feedback loops that enrich and deepen both cultural ground and individual's prior skills. "[B]asic skills evolve phylogenetically, enabling the creation of cultural products historically, which then provide developing children with the biological and cultural tools they need to develop ontogenetically".
The sharing of attention and of intention is taken to be prior to language in evolutionary time and in an individual's lifetime, while conditioning language's acquisition through the parsing of joint attentional scenes into actors, objects, events and the like. More broadly, Tomasello sees the sharing of attention and of intention as the roots of human cultural world (the roots of conventions, of group identity, of institutions): ""Human reasoning, even when it is done internally with the self, is ... shot through and through with a kind of collective normativity in which the individuals regulate her actions and thinking based on the group's normative conventions and standards".
Willem Johannes Maria (Pim) Levelt (born 17 May 1938 in Amsterdam) is a Dutch psycholinguist. He is an influential researcher of human language acquisition and speech production. He developed a comprehensive theory of the cognitive processes involved in the act of speaking, including the significance of the "mental lexicon". Levelt was the founding director of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. He also served as president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences between 2002 and 2005, of which he has been member since 1978.
Levelt became a member of the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina in 1993. In 2000 he became a foreign associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States. Levelt became a corresponding member (living abroad) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in 2002. In 2010 Levelt was awarded the "Orden Pour le Mérite für Wissenschaften und Künste", receiving the orden in person from the President of Germany on 30 May 2011.
Dan Isaac Slobin (born May 7, 1939) is a Professor Emeritus of psychology and linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. Slobin has made major contributions to the study of children's language acquisition, and his work has demonstrated the importance of cross-linguistic comparison for the study of language acquisition and psycholinguistics in general.
Slobin received a B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan in 1960 and a Ph.D. in social psychology from Harvard University in 1964. In addition to working at the University of California, Berkeley, Slobin has served as a visiting professor at several universities around the world, including Boğaziçi University, Tel-Aviv University, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and Stanford University.
Slobin has extensively studied the organization of information about spatial relations and motion events by speakers of different languages, including both children and adults. He has argued that becoming a competent speaker of a language requires learning certain language-specific modes of thinking, which he dubbed "thinking for speaking". Slobin's "thinking for speaking" view can be described as a contemporary, moderate version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which claims that the language we learn shapes the way we perceive reality and think about it. This view is often contrasted with the "language acquisition device" view of Noam Chomsky and others, who think of language acquisition as a process largely independent of learning and cognitive development.
Slobin did a research study, published in 2007, titled the "Children use canonical sentence schemas: A crosslinguistic study of word order and inflections." The aim of the study was to show that we must not generalize that the acquiring of English language in children is the same as the acquiring of "x" languages. Slobin proposed that children "construct a canonical sentence schema as a preliminary organizing structure for language behaviour. This canonical sentence schemas provide a functional explanation for the order of words and inflectional strategies based on each child's attempt to quickly master basic communication skills in his or her languages."
Slobin believes that language is acquired and is a learning as well as cognitive development in a child. His choice of method is the result of his theoretical stance where, in task-comparison activity, his subjects get exposed to a consistent variety of tests, administered differently over a period of ten days. In task-comparison, his subjects get to perform or answer questions by displaying the instructions given.
Slobin also designed a project, along with Ruth Berman in the beginning of 1980. He created "The frog-story project", a research tool which was a children's storybook that tells a story in 24 pictures with no words. This makes it possible to elicit narratives that are comparable in content but differing in form, across age and languages. There is now data from dozens of languages and most of the world's major language types. The Berman & Slobin study compared English, German, Spanish, Hebrew and Turkish on a range of dimensions.
His project was also mentioned in Raphael Berthele, a professor in the University of Fribourg, Switzerland on her work in the "Crosslinguistic approaches to the psychology approach" by Elena Lieven, Jiansheng Guo.
Elizabeth Ann Bates (July 26, 1947 – December 13, 2003) was a Professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego. She was an internationally renowned expert and leading researcher in child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, aphasia, and the neurological bases of language, and she authored 10 books and over 200 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on these subjects. Bates was well known for her assertion that linguistic knowledge is distributed throughout the brain and is subserved by general cognitive and neurological processes.
Elizabeth Bates earned a B.A. from St. Louis University in 1968, and an M.A. and PhD in human development from the University of Chicago in 1971 and 1974, respectively.
She was employed as a tenure-track professor at the University of Colorado from 1974-1981 before joining the faculty of the University of California, San Diego, where she worked until late 2003. Bates was one of the founders of the Department of Cognitive Science at UCSD, the first department of its kind in the USA. She was also the director of the UCSD Center of Research in Language and the co-director of the San Diego State University/UCSD Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communication Disorders. Bates also served as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1976-1977 and at the National Research Council Institute of Psychology in Rome.
On December 13, 2003, Elizabeth Bates died, after a year-long struggle with pancreatic cancer. Over the course of more than thirty years, Bates had established herself as a world leader in a number of fields – child development, language acquisition, aphasia research, cross-linguistic research, bilingualism, psycholinguistics and their neural underpinnings, and had trained, supported and collaborated with a diverse and international group of researchers and students. The Elizabeth Bates Graduate Research Fund was established at UCSD in her memory to assist graduate students' research.
In defense of communication functioning as a main force of language acquisition, she looked to the prelinguistic use of commands by infants that required them to develop and use social skills. She highlighted the reliance on pointing by infants in order to fill their need to communicate before they are able to speak. The child's ability to incorporate imperatives in their gestures in order to make a command or request was found in her research and shows the necessity of communication regardless of language. Bates also coined the term , a word-like utterance made by prelinguistic children that has meaning (e.g. yumyum), but does not represent the adult-like form.
Domain-Specificity, Modularity and Neural Plasticity in Language Processing.
Bates and colleagues also showed that after brain injury, adult aphasic patients' deficits were not specific to linguistic structures theorized to be localized to specific brain areas, or even restricted to the linguistic domain. Deficits and lesion sites instead overlap in the role that they affect speech fluency and complexity. Language is viewed as interrelated with cognitive processes such as memory, pattern recognition, and spreading activation. This perspective runs counter to the theory of Noam Chomsky, Eric Lenneberg, and Steven Pinker that language is processed in a domain-specific manner, by specific language modules in the mind, and can be localized to specific brain regions such as Broca's and Wernicke's areas.
David Swinney (April 21, 1946 – April 14, 2006) was a prominent psycholinguist. His research on language comprehension contributed to methodological advances in his field.
Swinney received his BA in Psychology at Indiana University in 1968, his MA in Language Disorders, Speech Pathology and Audiology (1969), and his PhD in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin (1974).
Swinney's faculty positions included: Tufts University (Department of Psychology), Rutgers University (Psychology and Cognitive Sciences Departments), the City University of New York (Programs in Linguistics, Psychology, Speech and Hearing Science) and University of California, San Diego (Chair, Department of Psychology).
Cross-Modal Priming Task. The Cross-Modal Priming Task (CMPT), developed by David Swinney, is an online measure used to detect activation of lexical and syntactic information during sentence comprehension.
Prior to Swinney's introduction of this methodology, studies of lexical access were largely procured by offline measures, such as a phoneme-monitoring task. In these measures, study participants were asked to respond to a syntactic or lexical ambiguity in a sentence only after the entire sentence had been comprehended. Since Swinney considered the system of resolving ambiguities to be an autonomous, fast, and mandatory process, he suggested that the “downstream” temporal delay between stimulus and response could contaminate results. The CMPT, therefore, was created to probe lexical access in real time.
During this task, study participants heard recorded sentences containing lexical or syntactic ambiguities while seated in front of a computer screen. At the same moment when the ambiguous word or phrase was uttered, simultaneously a string of letters---either a word or a non-word---was flashed on the computer screen, and the participant was required to indicate whether it was a word or not, by pressing one of two buttons on a computer keyboard.
The uttered words had an ambiguous meaning or were an ambiguous phrase (for example: "mouse" - which could be understood as an animal or as a computer input device).
The words shown on the screen - when they were actual lexical words (and not non-words), could be related to one of the meanings of the uttered word or phrase (for example, on the screen the written word could be "animal", or "computer"), or the written word on the screen could be a control word or phrase, unrelated to the uttered word or phrase (for example, "sun").
Study participants were then asked to respond as quickly as possible once the probes were processed (i.e. once they understood them). The test assumed that multiple meanings are activated at the moment an ambiguity is encountered in a sentence, which primes related concepts. Swinney's anticipated quicker recognition of concepts, once related concepts were primed and thus activated, as opposed to words that had not been activated.
This study utilized a CMPT, in order to investigate the process by which people resolve lexical ambiguity. Specifically, do people access all meanings of words at such moments, or only one meaning? Subjects listened to pre-recorded series of sentences that contained ambiguous words. These words were equibiased—meaning that there were two possible meanings of each ambiguous word and that one meaning was not favored over the other in common speech. The subjects were informed that they would be tested on their comprehension of these sentences.
For example, subjects were presented with the utterance: "Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several bugs in the corner of the room." Here, the word "bugs" was determined to be ambiguous and equibiased towards the meaning of either "insects" on one hand, or "surveillance" on the other. At the moment of the utterance "… bugs" either "ANT" or "SPY" or an unrelated word such as "SEW" or non-word, were flashed on the screen. Study participants were asked to decide, as quickly as possible, whether the string of letters was a word or not.
Additionally, context conditions varied in that some had no biasing context, as above, or they strongly biased the listener towards one meaning or another. For example, "Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches and other bugs in the corner of the room."
Swinney claimed that if a person activates both meanings of an equibiased ambiguous word simultaneously, then the response times should be the same regardless of which meaning is primed by the stimulus. However, if one meaning or another is activated, then the response time should be quicker for the priming of that meaning.
Results indicated that listeners accessed multiple meanings for ambiguous words, even when faced with strong biasing contexts that indicated a single meaning. That is to say that regardless of whether "the man was not surprised when he found several bugs in the corner of the room" or "the man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches and other bugs in the corner of the room" was uttered, both SPY (contextually inappropriate to the second sentence) and ANT (contextually appropriate) appear to have been primed equally, whereas SEW and non-words were not.
In this study, Love, Maas and Swinney explored lexical access, using the CMPT, among three different categories of English proficient individuals: monolingual native English speakers (NINES), non-native English speakers (NNES) and bilingual native English speakers (BNES). Particularly, they were interested in how these different groups resolved non-canonical object-relative constructions that contained an ambiguous noun with a strong biasing context. For example, a prior experiment used the following sentence:
"The professor insisted that the exam be completed in ink, so Jimmy used the new pen (Probe Position1), that his mother-in-law recently (Probe Position2) purchased (Probe Position3) because the multiple colors allowed for more creativity."
This object-relative construction is considered non-canonical because the direct object "pen" occurs before its associated verb "purchased". Thus, it can be considered a "fronted direct object". The argument relies on the ambiguity of the word, "pen" which could mean either a writing instrument, or a jail cell. The Probe Positions 1, 2 and 3 indicated in the sentence above indicate the points at which the study participants were presented with a word on a computer screen, in a cross-modal decision task similar to the one described above. Moreover, the Probes represented either one ("pencil") or another interpretation ("jail") of the noun "pen" or were non-related controls ("jacket" or "tale") or a non-word of equivalent length.
After qualifying language pre-tests and completion of a self-report questionnaire about language proficiency, background, and age of second language acquisition, subjects were classified as either BNES or NNES. The non-English languages identified were of wide variety (e.g. Russian, Cantonese, Greek, Mandarin, Vietnamese, Spanish, Korean), and the researchers emphasize that most of the languages represented place less importance on word order than the English language. The study subjects participated in a CMPT that utilized object-relative sentences such as the one above, or a filler sentence of equivalent length and complexity. Response times were measured and compared.
Overall, all the English-proficient individuals tested activated both meanings of the ambiguous direct object as soon as it was presented, despite the strong biasing context. Then, in the NINES group, activation had dissipated 700 ms downstream (PP2), until the primary meaning was reactivated at Probe Position 3, after the verb. However, for the contextually appropriate interpretation, the non-NINES did not reactivate the fronted direct object in Probe Position 3. Researchers attributed this difference to the prior exposure of many in the non-NINES groups to languages that relied less explicitly on word order for comprehension.
In this experiment, Zurif, Swinney and Garret built upon existing research on language processing errors in Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia patients. Prior studies indicate that, generally, Broca's aphasia patients demonstrate a slower-than-normal time course of lexical activation than controls; whereas, lexical activation is relatively unimpaired in Wernicke's aphasics. This study compared and contrasted selected patients’ capacities for resolving subject-relative constructions through a process known as gap filling. For example:
"The gymnast loved the professor* from the northern city who* (t)* complained about the bad coffee."
Since the displaced "who" is intended to modify "the professor" in this sentence, reactivation of antecedent "the professor" at "who" refers to the process of gap filling. Here, the gap between the subject noun phrase and relative pronoun is necessarily resolved through mental reordering of the sentence's structural elements.
Findings indicated that, in support of the hypothesis, the capacity and resources available to patients with Wernicke's aphasia to procure appropriate gap filling remain intact. Although this process appears to be preserved, the researchers point out that other related processes, such as higher-level sentence comprehension, might be impaired.
On the other hand, the gap filling process in Broca's patients was significantly impaired. Results showed that priming was not activated at any of the probe positions—signifying a poverty of resources available to these patients for real-time processing such subject-relative constructions. The researchers argue, based on these results, that neurological damage to the left anterior cortex implicates this region in resolving gap-filling operations during sentence comprehension.
Jeffrey Locke Elman (January 22, 1948 – June 28, 2018) was an American psycholinguist and professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He specialized in the field of neural networks.
In 1990, he introduced the simple recurrent neural network (SRNN), also known as the 'Elman network', which is capable of processing sequentially ordered stimuli, and has since become widely used.
Elman's work was highly significant to our understanding of how languages are acquired and also, once acquired, how sentences are comprehended. Sentences in natural languages are composed of sequences of words that are organized in phrases and hierarchical structures. The Elman network provides an important hypothesis for how neural networks—and, by analogy, the human brain—might be doing the learning and processing of such structures.
Elman was also a generous and kind person, beloved by his colleagues at UCSD and around the world.
Elman attended Palisades High School in Pacific Palisades, California, then Harvard University, where he graduated in 1969. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1977.
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.

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