Event

Title: Why speaking surpasses understanding, sometimes

There are many reasons to think of speaking as harder than understanding. We often encounter conscious difficult in speaking, whereas understanding tends to feel really easy. Production is typically developmentally delayed relative to comprehension. Neurological disruption more commonly affects production than comprehension. Yet in our lab studies we have repeatedly been finding the opposite when we look at closely matched linguistic phenomena: fragility in comprehension paired with robustness in production. We were aware of a number of cases of such contrasts prior to the pandemic. Then the pandemic push towards online experimentation led us to develop new ways of studying speaking, which unexpectedly led us to some key clues to the comprehension-production contrast.