Affiliated with the Cognitive Division

I'm interested in the relationship between language, memory and attention. For instance, how do various cues in speech, like prosody and disfluency, affect what listeners pay attention to and what they later remember? Since we cannot pay attention to and remember everything we hear, these cues are important in determining what it is that we do understand.

A second line of research concerns disfluencies, or interruptions in regular speech. When we speak, we often encounter problems like saying "uh" and "um" or repeating words we have already said. I am conducting work (a) exploring how various kinds of disfluencies differ and how they may reflect differ problems or processes in language production, and (b) examining how listeners comprehend speech that is disfluent.