Colin Phillips

About

Colin Phillips is a Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. He is a member of the Maryland Language Science Center. His research expertise includes language acquisition, neurolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Phillips's work focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying language processing and production, with particular attention to syntactic constraints, sentence planning, and the relationship between parsing and generation. His research investigates how syntactic categories influence lexical access during speech, the grammatical distinctions affecting sentence production, and the cognitive processes involved in language comprehension and memory. He has contributed to advancing theories on how linguistic knowledge is systematically assembled in real-time language use, and how language processing relates to language acquisition, including developmental aspects in children and adult learners.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• Speech recognition

Selected publications

• Syntactic category constrains lexical competition in speaking

  Cognition · 2020 · 16 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Auditory Word Comprehension Is Less Incremental in Isolated Words

  Neurobiology of Language · 2022 · 14 citations

  Partial speech input is often understood to trigger rapid and automatic activation of successively higher-level representations of words, from sound to meaning. Here we show evidence from magnetoencephalography that this type of incremental processing is limited when words are heard in isolation as compared to continuous speech. This suggests a less unified and automatic word recognition process than is often assumed. We present evidence from isolated words that neural effects of phoneme probabi…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Why non-native speakers sometimes outperform native speakers in agreement processing

  Bilingualism Language and Cognition · 2022-06-24 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract It is well-known that native English speakers sometimes erroneously accept subject-verb agreement violations when there is a number-matching attractor (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were…). Whether bilinguals whose L1 lacks number agreement are prone to such interference is unclear, given previous studies that report conflicting findings using different structures, participant groups, and experimental designs. To resolve the conflict, we examined highly proficient Korean–English biling…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Agreement attraction error and timing profiles in continuous speech

  Glossa Psycholinguistics · 2022 · 11 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Studies of agreement attraction in language production have shown that speakers systematically produce verb agreement errors in the presence of a local noun whose features differ from that of the agreement controller. However, in attraction experiments, these errors only ever occur in a subset of trials. In the present study, we applied a naturalistic scene-description paradigm to investigate how attraction affects the distribution of errors and the time-course of correctly inflected verbs. We c…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Theories All the Way Down

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-12-09 · 7 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  It is common in linguistics to contrast "theoretical" and "experimental" research. Researchers who pursue experimental research are often asked about the theoretical consequences of their work. Such questions generally equate "theoretical" with theories at a specific high level of abstraction, guided by the questions of traditional linguistic theory. These theories focus on the structural representation of sentences in terms of discrete units, without regard to order, time, finer-grained memory…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sources of argument role insensitivity in verb processing

  NSF · $17k · 2023–2024

• Structure Generation in Language Comprehension

  NSF · $547k · 2009–2015

• Doctoral Dissertation Improvement: Fast and Slow Linguistic Predictions

  NSF · $18k · 2015–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Nigel Fabb

  University of Strathclyde

  681 shared

• Caroline Heycock

  681 shared

• Andrew Simpson

  Durham University

  680 shared

• Malka Rappaport Hovav

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  680 shared

• Andrew Spencer

  University of Essex

  680 shared

• Ruth Horn

  Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities

  680 shared

• Robert D. Borsley

  Bangor University

  680 shared

• James Blevins Cambridge

  Tianjin Normal University

  680 shared

Labs

• CLIPPI

Education

• Ph.D, Linguistics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1996

• BA, Modern Languages

  University of Oxford

  1990

Similar researchers at University of Maryland, College Park

• Philip Resnikh-55
• Xiaoyu Yangh-46
• Ellen Lauh-39