Welcome to the Center for Research in Language (CRL)

CRL brings together faculty, students and research associates who share an interest in the nature of language, the processes by which language is acquired and used, and the mediation of language in the human brain.

CRL is housed in the Cognitive Science Building on the Thurgood Marshall Campus at the University of California, San Diego and boasts an interdisciplinary academic staff comprised of specialists in a wide variety of fields:

  • Cognitive science
  • Communication
  • Communication disorders
  • Computer science
  • Developmental psychology
  • Linguistics
  • Neurosciences
  • Pediatrics
  • Psycholinguistics

CRL Talks

January 18, 2022

Constraints on sound structure at multiple levels of analysis

Matt Goldrick

Northwestern University (at UCSD for Jan. + Feb.)

Although understanding the mind/brain has been argued to require developing theories at multiple levels of analysis (Marr, 1982, et seq.), in practice specific research projects (my own included!) typically privilege explanations at a particular level of description. I'll discuss two recent projects from my lab that critically relied on understanding sound structure at different levels of explanation. The structured variation of external sandhi arises in part due to the nature of the psychological mechanisms that compute word forms in production. Psycholinguistic studies of implicit learning of phonotactic constraints yielded puzzles that can only be resolved by considering constraints on phonotactic grammars. Insights like these suggest researchers in the cognitive science of language may benefit from more careful attention to insights at multiple levels of analysis.