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'm also a visiting researcher at Waseda University in Tokyo, where I'm writing my dissertation on the role of processing factors in word order variation and change. I'm trying to understand what makes certain word orders easier or harder to process, and relating those findings to the ways that languages differ from each other in the choices they give their speakers, and how they change over time. My advisor is Tom Wasow.
My undergrad degree was in Psychology and Artificial Intelligence from the University of Birmingham, where I also worked with Antje Meyer on the role of gaze and visual attention in language production. I then spent 18 months studying computational linguistics at Keio University. Since, I've had affiliations with Luc Steels' language group at Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris, and Ted Gibson's lab in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.
My focus is on understanding language as an emergent system which has arisen to solve a constrained problem of communication. 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? Some of this work is in collaboration with Steve Piantadosi at MIT.
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 with Ev Fedorenko and Ted Gibson; Barbara Hemforth and Tom Wasow, and others. Finally, I do some work on probabilistically conditioned phonetic and phonological variation in collaboration with Susanne Gahl, Joan Bresnan, Victor Kuperman and others.
Page last updated August 2008 [ updated info ]