THEORY: Parsing spoken language.

> Date:         Wed, 24 Nov 1999 02:38:16 -0500
> From: Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
> When I see "there car", my brain thinks "in/to that place", and then has
> to back up when it hits "car" to figure out what other entry it could
> mean, while when it hears /DIr kAr/, it already holds all the possible
> meanings, and eliminates nonsensical ones.  Or something like that.
Have you ever had the experience where you're talking to someone, and
they say a phrase that sounds like pure gibberish --- you start asking
for clarification, but suddenly while you're speaking the other
person's phrase 'clicks' in your mind and is perfectly understandable.

I take stuff like that as informal evidence that there's some sort of
very short term phonological memory in our brain, and a sort of
pattern matching device that tries to make sense of it. Normally it
works too fast for us to notice.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)