Yay this is one of my favorite topics!!!! I work in psycholinguistics, specifically studying how people process sentences. I'm really interested in how people use probabilistic information about their language while processing & producing. Here are my favorite articles: Aylett & Turk (2004). The Smooth Signal Redundancy Hypothesis: A Functional Explanation for Relationships between Redundancy, Prosodic Prominence, and Duration in Spontaneous Speech. Language and Speech. Levy (2008). Expectation-based syntactic comprehension. Cognition. I always find myself linking people to this paper because it's extremely useful when doing categorical data analysis since apparently all intro statistics ever teaches are t-tests and ANOVA: [Jaeger (2008). Categorical data analysis: Away from ANOVAs (transformation or not) and towards logit mixed models. Journal of Memory and Language.](http://www.researchgate.net/profile/T_Florian_Jaeger/publication/38063025_Categorical_Data_Analysis_Away_from_ANOVAs_(transformation_or_not)_and_towards_Logit_Mixed_Models/links/09e41500d7edfc3aa5000000.pdf) One of my favorite recent experimental papers: Jaeger & Snider (2013). Alignment as a consequence of expectation adaptation: Syntactic priming is affected by the prime’s prediction error given both prior and recent experience. Cognition.
Jaeger & Snider (2013). Alignment as a consequence of expectation adaptation: Syntactic priming is affected by the prime’s prediction error given both prior and recent experience. Cognition. That's a really neat paper, thanks so much for sharing it! I'd actually noticed this effect in myself, but never really thought much about it and this paper was a great intro to the topic for me. The most vivid and extensive time it happened to me was when I spent a lot of time reading "The Grapes Of Wrath." I noticed that I was thinking and occasionally speaking in the dialect of the main characters in the book. I have noticed it at other shorter intervals in conversations with others and as a result of reading other books or watching TV shows. What an amazing thing our brain can do. As a science teacher, we are frequently encouraged to get the students to "talk" in the language of science and to model the language of science so that they will use it themselves. I wonder if there is a connection here and this study helps explain what's going on? PS that stats paper is interesting too. I actually love stats and find the topic fascinating, but my advanced math skills are not that great. I did however find this line about ANOVAs interesting in the context of the paper: "For continuous outcomes, the means, variances, and the confidence intervals have straightforward interpretations. But what happens if the outcome is categorical?" I had never really thought about this disconnect between ANOVA and categorical outcomes in this way. It seems almost silly to use ANOVA in such a situation. PPS The other papers are on the longer side, I'll get to them soon :)