Kiel Christianson

Christianson Studies How We Interpret, and Misinterpret, Language

While Anna dressed the baby spit up on the bed.

The mind befuddles at the above sentence, used frequently by Beckman Institute faculty member Kiel Christianson in linguistics experiments. Read it again and try to figure out what happened. Did Anna dress the baby? Did the baby spit up on the bed?

Usually, more than half of test subjects in Christianson’s experiment say yes to both questions. However, by inserting a comma between “dressed” and “the” in that sentence to make it easier to parse, then the number of responders who say Anna dressed the baby are almost nil.

Those responses get to the heart of Christianson’s research, which seeks to understand how people integrate various information sources to interpret, and sometimes misinterpret, written and spoken language. A member of Beckman’s Cognitive Science group, Christianson’s perspective on language processing deviates from traditional thinking in the field in that he believes the brain sometimes takes a “good enough” approach to language comprehension.

Christianson said his use of the term “good enough” doesn’t mean sloppy or lazy.

“It means that once a certain level of interpretation that seems plausible is reached, there may be a disconnect between the interpretive processes and the more linguistic processes of building a grammatical structure,” he said. “All that might still go on, but by that time the interpretation has moved on because you have gotten to a level where everything seemed to make sense and any revision would be too costly for what it is you want to be doing with language.”

Christianson, who is director of the Educational Psychology Psycholinguistics Laboratory at Beckman and an Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at Illinois, says his research deals with the way that we interpret and comprehend language, either spoken or written, in real time.

“The cornerstone of what I am interested in is how we go from the input that decades of psycholinguistic work has suggested is processed pretty quickly and very well, how we go from a mental representation of that linguistic input, to not only comprehending language but how we interpret it within the context of everything we know about the world,” he said.

Christianson said that previous work has shown that when people are reading they usually take about a fifth of a second to extract enough information to recognize a word.

“One of my questions is related to this good enough idea: how much information is enough information, what is the critical information we need to recognize a word,” he said. “Traditionally speaking it has been considered that the true linguistic processing of the sound, the syntax, the morphology, is automatic and cost free in terms of processing; it just happens.