ANOMALOUS AND NOVEL LANGUAGE

When we read conversations in novels or listen to TV presenters, we might get the impression that the language around us is always very orderly and grammatical. But this is not the case - speakers start saying something but then change their mind and start again, they produce disfluencies (such as uhs and ums), make speech errors, or interrupt their conversation partners. 

What is more, these days we also communicate a lot with typed speech (in texts or social media), and it quite often does not come out exactly as we intended (be it because of hasty typing or the notorious autocorrect). For example, one might intend to type "I will call you in two hours" but instead send to their recipient "I will in two hours".

How do comprehenders deal with anomalies? How do they construct a mental representation for utterances when words are missing? Especially when these words are important for constructing a grammatical representation for an utterance, do comprehenders  rely mostly on word meaning, or to they repair the grammatical representation? And, how do anomalies influence comprehenders' own language systems? Language knowledge is not static but flexibly adapts to speakers' linguistic environment, although such adaptation would occur for features that  would have some future relevance for speakers' language use and not to random variations. Which features of anomalous utterances do we perceive as having future relevance, and which do we perceive as random?

Also, what makes us more likely to produce anomalous language when we type? Which words are we more likely to omit when we type and why?

And, we can get quite creative with our language use. We can make up new words that we have never heard before. How come we can use words for which we don't have mental representations? How do we go about making them up, and what factors help our listeners interpret them?

Some relevant work:

• Ivanova, I., Wardlow, L., Warker, J., & Ferreira, V.S. (2017). The effect of anomalous utterances on language production. Memory & Cognition, 45(2), 308-319. PDF

• ​Ivanova, I., Branigan, H.P., McLean, J.F., Costa, A., & Pickering, M.J. (2017). Do you what I say? People reconstruct the syntax of anomalous utterances. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 32(2), 175-189. PDF

• Ivanova, I., Pickering, M.J., McLean, J.F., Costa, A., & Branigan, H.P. (2012). How do people produce ungrammatical utterances? Journal of Memory and Language, 67, 355-370. PDF

• Ivanova, I., Pickering, M.J., Branigan, H.P., McLean, J.F., & Costa, A. (2012). The comprehension of anomalous sentences: Evidence from structural priming. Cognition, 122, 193-209. PDF