Language comprehension seems fast, effortless and error-free — at least, to the extent that we can introspect about it. Underneath this apparently seamless part of our day-to-day experience lies a complex working memory system. To avoid overwhelming our limited processing capacity, information is constantly being shuffled back and forth between states of accessibility and storage, between attention and inattention. As a consequence, linguistic knowledge, richly detailed and precise, must be adapted to a working memory which is rapid and error-prone. How this adaptation can be achieved is revealing, both about how we remember language and about how we forget it.

Co-sponsored by the Institute for Humanities Research and the Department of Linguistics.