Harry Tily

Linguistics, Margaret Jacks Hall, Stanford University, CA 94305, USA

hjt@stanford.edu
1-650-723-2213
Office: 460-122

I'm a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University. I work on the cognitive science of language, and primarily on human processing and representation of syntactic structure.

Before coming to Stanford, I was working on computational language learning at Keio University, under Shun Ishizaki. Before that, I studied Psychology and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Birmingham, where I also worked with Antje Meyer on the role of gaze and visual attention in language production.

In 2006, I was affiliated with Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, where I worked on simulated language emergence and evolution, looking at the emergence and change of particular syntactic constructions as a natural product of functional, task-oriented constraints. I have also been a visitor in Ted Gibson's lab (Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT) working on language processing.

My focus is on understanding language as an emergent system which has arisen to solve a constrained problem of communication. I study variation in syntax, both synchronically and diachronically, and the factors that those variations are sensitive to. In particular, I'm interested in the influence of processing factors: how has the human capacity for language shaped the languages that have emerged after many generations of use?

I'm also interested in the contribution of different linguistic and metalinguistic cues in comprehension: how do listener's expectations change when we manipulate the sources of information they receive, and what does this tell us about the way they combine that information to understand the speaker? This includes work on processing alternative word orders in Japanese; agreement in Romance languages; using eye-movements to understand the ways in which comprehenders are sensitive to the probability of linguistic structures (with Barbara Hemforth, Tom Wasow, and others); as well as looking for evidence of those probabilities in articulation (with Susanne Gahl, Joan Bresnan and others).

Page last updated August 2008 [ updated info ]