Poster presentation at IWoLP

I recently gave a poster presentation at the International Workshop on Language Production (IWoLP 2012) held at New York University, July 18-20. The conference was quite interesting. It definitely was oriented more toward (neuro)psychology than linguistics (i.e., lots of fMRI studies, few grammatical judgment surveys), yet was still a large enough program that there was something for everyone.

In my poster presentation, I tried to make the strongest argument that I could for the hypothesis that filled pauses have a lexical status equivalent to other words in the lexicon. A copy of my poster can be downloaded here. I had several people visit to discuss filled pauses in language production. I got one really good question from one of the more well-known attendees. Basically, she asked what value is there in deciding the hypothesis one way or the other. This is a great question and I gave her an answer, but I'm not really satisfied with it. (And, I suspect, neither was she.) Anyway, I'd like to take it up more properly in another post soon.