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Matt Wagers / Representations in flux: Stabilization, commitment and grammatical organization

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Matt Wagers / Representations in flux: Stabilization, commitment and grammatical organization

Linguistics | Maryland Language Science Center Monday, September 14, 2026 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm

Monday September 14, distinguished alum Matt Wagers *08 (Santa Cruz) joins us to share his work on how we use short-term memory to build the representation of syntactic dependencies, focussing on his work with verb-initial languages, especially Zapotec and Chamorro. His talk, "Representations in flux: Stabilization, commitment and grammatical organization," is abstracted below.

How pervasive is the involvement of working memory in language processing? Addressing this question requires us to first ask how linguistic expressions place demands on working memory in the first place. An intuitive answer appeals to dependency, and the need to maintain information over time or distance. However, the fingerprints of WM – like interference or retrieval-like timecourses – can be found even on dependencies of seemingly trivial lengths, like adjacent words. In this talk, I want to take a wider view, shifting focus away from distance and dependency per se, and bringing into the frame other kinds of time-sensitive actions that comprehenders take to regulate or stabilize the availability of representations as they are being built. I will do this primarily by considering what we’ve learned in the last decade about language processing from users of verb-initial languages, especially Zapotec and Chamorro. In many environments, comprehenders seem less impelled to commit early to analyses of vulnerable dependencies, waiting until morphologically-decisive information is reached; rather they give evidence of venturing partial, fleeting or defeasible interpretations that they ultimately don’t settle on. I will attempt to relate these patterns to policies comprehenders adopt for managing the availability of evolving representations over time. This broader perspective on WM dynamics invites us to investigate diverse grammatical systems to better understand the temporal control problems they pose.

Add to Calendar 09/14/26 15:30:00 09/14/26 17:00:00 America/New_York Matt Wagers / Representations in flux: Stabilization, commitment and grammatical organization

Monday September 14, distinguished alum Matt Wagers *08 (Santa Cruz) joins us to share his work on how we use short-term memory to build the representation of syntactic dependencies, focussing on his work with verb-initial languages, especially Zapotec and Chamorro. His talk, "Representations in flux: Stabilization, commitment and grammatical organization," is abstracted below.

How pervasive is the involvement of working memory in language processing? Addressing this question requires us to first ask how linguistic expressions place demands on working memory in the first place. An intuitive answer appeals to dependency, and the need to maintain information over time or distance. However, the fingerprints of WM – like interference or retrieval-like timecourses – can be found even on dependencies of seemingly trivial lengths, like adjacent words. In this talk, I want to take a wider view, shifting focus away from distance and dependency per se, and bringing into the frame other kinds of time-sensitive actions that comprehenders take to regulate or stabilize the availability of representations as they are being built. I will do this primarily by considering what we’ve learned in the last decade about language processing from users of verb-initial languages, especially Zapotec and Chamorro. In many environments, comprehenders seem less impelled to commit early to analyses of vulnerable dependencies, waiting until morphologically-decisive information is reached; rather they give evidence of venturing partial, fleeting or defeasible interpretations that they ultimately don’t settle on. I will attempt to relate these patterns to policies comprehenders adopt for managing the availability of evolving representations over time. This broader perspective on WM dynamics invites us to investigate diverse grammatical systems to better understand the temporal control problems they pose.

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