Final Report Summary - UNIVERSAL (A Universal Model of Word Comprehension)
In addition to this work on cross-linguistic differences, we have also conducted two main extensions of the original proposal. One of these extensions was to connect our work on language with the broader research on statistical learning of regularities across space and time. This work has helped highlight now the differences that emerge between visual and auditory word processing may not be due to language processing per se, but may instead be attributable to domain-general processing mechanisms that are interacting with modality specific constraints.
Furthermore, this project has helped connect studies of language to computational models not only at the behavioral level, but also at a more detailed and mechanistically explicit level in terms of the online measurement of the neural correlates of language processing. Consequently, the resulting theories and models offer an unprecedented unifying account of various aspects of language processing, which are suitable for integration of future findings from a wide area of research and for extensions to other related systems (e.g. episodic memory, semantic memory).