In this talk, I address the question of how general cognitive capabilities help shape what human languages look like. I do so by showing that the acquisition of certain aspects of language depends on specific types of memory using both behavioral and neuroimaging data. In particular, I demonstrate that rules and analogy are supported by procedural memory (memory for sequences) and declarative memory (memory for facts), respectively. This, combined with data from my colleagues on tone, suggests that some people may be better at acquiring certain types of languages depending on non-linguistic cognitive skills, neuroanatomical structure and, ultimately, genetics. I outline how we are currently exploring some of these questions as well as what alternatives there are to genetic determinism. Of interest to computational researchers, I will also present the early stages of a project exploring how these general cognitive biases may exert pressure on language via iterated learning.

If we conceptualize a theory of human sentence comprehension as a combination of (1) a grammar (2) a strategy for using the rules of the grammar and (3) some architectural facilities like memory we still have a huge space of possible theories. It would be nice to narrow this class down to just those that somehow made sense in relation to the communicative function sentence-comprehension often serves.

This talk examines a smaller class of comprehension theories that strive to finish parsing as soon as possible. These theories would be ``rational'' on a view of the comprehender as doing his or her best to understand what the speaker means. I shall argue that they correctly derive well-known garden pathing phenomena along with the puzzling Local Coherence effects studied by Tabor, Galantuccia and Richardson (2004). Time permitting, I will discuss the relationship between this class of theories and the Entropy Reduction Hypothesis revived in Hale (2006).

Tabor, W., Galantuccia, B., & Richardson, D. (2004). Effects of merely local syntactic coherence on sentence processing. Journal of Memory and Language, 50 (4), 355-370.

Hale, J. (2006). Uncertainty about the rest of the sentence. Cognitive Science, 30 (4), 609-642.

I will argue that listeners modify the way they process language according to the circumstances, and concentrate on the case of processing non-native speech. I will describe the results of an eye-tracking study that demonstrates that listeners rely on contextual cues to a greater degree, even at the expense of the speech input, when they listen to non-native speakers. I will also show findings that suggest that this ability to modify the way one processes language depends on one's Working Memory Capacity.

I will present ongoing work in close collaboration with Morgan Sonderegger (Computer Science, U Chicago) and Peter Graff (Linguistics, MIT) on the dynamics of sociophonetic variation among the contestants of "Big Brother", a British reality-TV program. The premise of the show is that sixteen contestants, or "housemates", of diverse linguistic background must live together in one house for 13 weeks under 24-hour audio/video surveillance (continually broadcast to viewers), completely isolated from the outside world; each week, the housemates vote to eliminate one of their number from the house, the object being to remain in the house for all 13 weeks, and to finally be selected as "winner" by a vote of viewers. Because of the continual surveillance and total linguistic isolation of the participants, Big Brother offers a unique natural experiment for sociophoneticians.

I will discuss two kinds of preliminary data that we have collected: measurements of the degree of social interaction between pairs of housemates over time, and measurements of several phonetic variables taken at regular intervals from a subset of the housemates. I will describe our tentative solutions to some of the methodological and statistical difficulties inherent in working with a large, spontaneous sociophonetic corpus of this nature, as well as the preliminary results and conclusions we have gleaned so far, including:

• a novel method of quantifying social affinities between individuals;
• the finding that some housemates exhibit significant phonetic change over the 13 weeks, while others do not;
• a suggestion that some changes may correlate with socially significant events.