Current Events

The existence of speech errors (e.g., intending to say “coin toss” and saying “toin coss” instead) and tip-of-the-tongue states (where someone knows exactly what they want to say, but cannot find how to say the right word) reveals an important fact about language production: whenever we say a word out loud, our minds need to select and assemble the sounds that make up that word so that we can properly articulate it. This process is called “phonological encoding” and happens quickly and (usually) without our explicit awareness. So how can we learn about what this process is like? I propose that spoken word durations offer us valuable clues into how phonological encoding works. In this talk, I review a pair of foundational patterns from the language production literature: form repetition reduction - where words are produced with shorter durations if they have recently been said or heard - and sequential cueing - where words are produced with longer durations if a word that begins with the same sounds has been recently said or heard - and I propose a theory that explains both effects as emerging organically as artifacts of the phonological encoding process. Specifically, the theory claims that the phonological encoding system learns after every production, and it makes testable predictions about the factors that shape repetition reduction and sequential cueing. I present simulations from a computational implementation of this theory to show that it can correctly account for the classic repetition reduction and sequential cueing effects. Lastly, I present novel predictions made by this theory and present data from 2 behavioral studies supporting one of these predictions: that contrary to previous proposals, repetition reduction and sequential cueing effects arise purely from the sequencing of sounds, and do not rely on lexical (i.e., word) representations.

On at least a daily basis, children and adults must figure out what others are thinking and feeling. In many ways, it is remarkable that humans ever get this right: There are so many relevant and irrelevant pieces of evidence that we can turn to in making these decisions. In my talk, I will discuss how my program of research aims to assess how children and adults solve the problem of what to attend to when reasoning about thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. In particular, I will focus on research where I have examined 5- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ beliefs about the durability of mental states (e.g., how long do desires last?) and the extent to which they use these beliefs to make social-cognitive predictions. I will also discuss ongoing and future work on how context (at both micro and macro levels) shapes these kinds of beliefs. I will then close with some bigger picture ideas of where my research is going over the next several years.

Two dimensions of lifetime dialect experience have been shown to affect cross-dialect lexical processing: familiarity (i.e., exposure to specific dialects) and multidialectalism (i.e., general exposure to dialect variation). These two dimensions, while conceptually distinct, are not well-separated in the literature, such that multidialectalism is often confounded with familiarity with the stimulus dialects in a particular study. In an early study on this topic from my lab, we concluded that multidialectal listeners exhibit lexical competition over a longer time course than monodialectal listeners, reflecting their experience with the lexical ambiguities that arise due to dialect variation. However, both of the stimulus dialects were familiar to the multidialectal listeners, whereas only one was highly familiar to the monodialectal listeners, and so we could not determine whether this pattern reflected general vs. specific dialect experience. In a series of more recent studies, we have disentangled this confound using a larger number of familiar and unfamiliar stimulus dialects, a broader range of lifetime dialect experiences, and additional experimental tasks. Together, the results point to a critical role of specific dialect experience in shaping lexical competition, rather than a more general effect of multi-dialectal exposure. The results further suggest that although binary distinctions between multidialectal and monodialectal listeners can be informative, more nuanced considerations of lifetime exposure and geographic mobility can provide further insight into the effects of dialect experience on lexical competition and processing.

TBA

We like to believe that hate is what happens when morality fails. The perpetrators of hate crimes, terrorism, and mass violence tell us otherwise: almost uniformly, they describe their actions as righteous – as justice, protection, or retribution on behalf of a people they love. This talk takes that claim seriously, treating extremists not as a moral aberration but as an extreme case that can reveal how moral cognition works in all of us. Drawing on a decade of research spanning the propaganda of terrorist organizations, the stated motivations of mass shooters and extremist offenders, and controlled experiments with ordinary media audiences, I argue that hate is not a breakdown of moral cognition but one of its outputs. The critical ingredient is perceived harm: when people come to see their group as the victim of another group’s intentional wrongdoing, ordinary moral machinery begins generating support for extraordinary cruelty. In this way, the moral psychology of the extremist and the moral psychology of the everyday citizen differ in degree, not in kind – and studying the former sharpens our theories of the latter. I will close with new work examining how people judge the harmfulness of real hateful messages – including whether observers can tell the difference between the words of those who merely talk and those who go on to commit extremist violence – and what repeated exposure to hate does, and surprisingly does not do, to the people who witness it.