Rachel Ryskin

How do humans understand each other? I study how individuals make sophisticated inferences, in real time, during communication in order to extract meaning from language input that can be noisy and ambiguous. I combine insights from eye-tracking, EEG, computational approaches, fieldwork, and neuropsychology to understand 1) how people use various sources of information (visuo-spatial perspective, the speaker’s knowledge state, language statistics, etc.) to generate and constrain their linguistic predictions, and 2) how lifelong learning allows inferences to be adaptive when the environment changes.