Learning, Memory, and Language Lab Research

The Learning, Memory, and Language Lab is currently pursuing several lines of research. Below is a description of our main areas of interest:

Perception, Action, and Cognition

What does it mean to say that language is meaningful to us? How do we understand language? We are attacking questions such as these by pursuing the hypothesis that linguistic meaning is grounded in our own systems of perception and action planning. That is, we understand sentences about action (e.g., Open the door) not in terms of the meaning of the individual words in the sentence, but in terms of the motor patterns needed to perform the action (e.g., pulling your arm towards your body), just as we understand sentences about motion (e.g., The car approached you) by recruiting our visual system to simulate what it would look like if a car actually was approaching us.

Check out our publications to learn more.

Learning and Adaptation in Language Processing

When we visit new parts of the world, talk to new people, or engage in different kinds of interpersonal interactions, our linguistic environment is constantly changing. We are interested in how changing patterns of experience with language affect the way that language is processed and used in the future. In one project, we explore what happens as you begin to adapt to new syntactic constructions in your native language (as might happen if you move between regions of a country). Other projects are focused on understanding how memory for particular linguistic events shapes subsequent language processing.

See our publications for more information.