Dr. Susan Teubner-Rhodes from Medical University of South Carolina will present on The cognitive comprehender: Mechanisms of language processing under conditions of uncertainty.  

Read the abstract below:

Despite the apparent ease with which we typically use and understand language, uncertainty or conflict can occur at all levels of language processing. Individuals interpret language input as it unfolds. One consequence of such real-time comprehension is that early interpretations may turn out to be incorrect: noise in the signal may result in misperception, individual words may have multiple meanings, and sentences may continue in unexpected ways. In these cases, listeners and readers must resolve between conflicting interpretations for communication to be successful. In my research, I aim to understand how cognitive abilities, like cognitive control, attention, and persistence, affect language processing under conditions of uncertainty, when misinterpretation is most likely to occur. I will discuss how age and experience affect cognition and ultimately impact language across multiple levels of the processing stream, from the early stages of speech recognition to higher-level construction of sentence meaning.