Now You Hear Me, Later You Don't: The Immediacy of Linguistic Computation and the Representation of Speech.

What happens to an acoustic signal after it enters the mind of a listener? Previous work has demonstrated that listeners maintain intermediate representations over time. However, the internal structure of such representations-be they the acoustic-phonetic signal or more general information about the probability of possible categories-remains underspecified. We present two experiments using a novel speaker-adaptation paradigm aimed at uncovering the format of speech representations.

Miller's monkey updated: Communicative efficiency and the statistics of words in natural language.

Is language designed for communicative and functional efficiency? G. K. Zipf famously argued that shorter words are more frequent because they are easier to use, thereby resulting in the statistical law that bears his name.