About

Colin Phillips is a Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Maryland. He is a member of the Maryland Language Science Center. His research expertise includes language acquisition, neurolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. Phillips's work focuses on understanding the mechanisms underlying language processing and production, with particular attention to syntactic constraints, sentence planning, and the relationship between parsing and generation. His research investigates how syntactic categories influence lexical access during speech, the grammatical distinctions affecting sentence production, and the cognitive processes involved in language comprehension and memory. He has contributed to advancing theories on how linguistic knowledge is systematically assembled in real-time language use, and how language processing relates to language acquisition, including developmental aspects in children and adult learners.

Research topics

• Artificial Intelligence
• Computer Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Mathematics
• Speech recognition

Selected publications

• Number and Grammatical Gender Attraction in Spanish Pronouns: Evidence for a Syntactic Route to Their Features

  Journal of Cognition · 2025-01-07

  articleOpen access

  When a speaker produces a pronoun, they must choose a form that carries the appropriate features. The current study investigates how speakers identify these features. We consider two possible routes: a conceptual-lexical route, whereby pronouns derive their features from the concept of the referent, and a syntactic route, whereby pronoun form is determined through a feature matching operation with the linguistic antecedent. We hypothesize that the use of these two routes should be differentially susceptible to interference from representations other than the pronoun's referent. We use agreement attraction to distinguish them. In two experiments, we test whether Spanish speakers produce number and grammatical gender attraction errors. We observe small but reliable attraction effects for both features, demonstrating that pronoun formulation can be disrupted by the linguistic representations of nearby nouns. These attraction effects suggest that speakers can use a syntactic route to pronoun form.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Argument role sensitivity in real-time sentence processing: Evidence from a hybrid comprehension and production task

  Cognition · 2025-07-16

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Previous studies suggest that comprehenders initially fail to use argument roles (i.e., who did what to whom) when generating expectations for upcoming words in sentence processing. In contrast, production studies show that people rarely produce role-inappropriate sentence continuations in a speeded cloze task, indicating rapid use of argument roles. This contrast in role-sensitivity is unexpected if both situations involve the same underlying processes and if the experimental measures equally reflect those processes. Here, we show that the apparent conflict arises from different task demands involved in comprehension and production experiments, and that when they are engaged in an identical next-word generation task, people show immediate use of argument roles in both comprehension and production. In two experiments, participants had to either produce a continuation of a sentence fragment or judge the plausibility of a complete sentence. The trial types were interleaved and presented randomly, which ensured that the sentence contexts were processed in the same way. In Experiment 1, we found rapid use of argument roles in the production trials, where participants produced target verbs more frequently and with faster onset times in role-appropriate than in role-reversed contexts, indicating that role-sensitivity in production was unaffected by the interleaved comprehension trials. In Experiment 2, the same hybrid design was used to measure role-sensitivity in the comprehension trials, while participants quickly produced sentence continuations in the interleaved production trials. A significantly smaller N400 was observed on target verbs presented in role-appropriate contexts than in role-reversed contexts, indicating immediate role-sensitivity in comprehension, as found in production. Together, the results indicate that argument roles have an immediate impact on processing, in both comprehension and production, when there is a need to quickly commit to a single next-word continuation. Our findings shed light on the connection between speaking and understanding, and more broadly, the relationship between perception and action in cognitive science.

  PublisherDOI

• Task and Timing Effects in Argument Role Sensitivity: Evidence From Production, EEG, and Computational Modeling

  Cognitive Science · 2024-12-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Comprehenders generate expectations about upcoming lexical items in language processing using various types of contextual information. However, a number of studies have shown that argument roles do not impact neural and behavioral prediction measures. Despite these robust findings, some prior studies have suggested that lexical prediction might be sensitive to argument roles in production tasks such as the cloze task or in comprehension tasks when additional time is available for prediction. This study demonstrates that both the task and additional time for prediction independently influence lexical prediction using argument roles, via evidence from closely matched electroencephalogram (EEG) and speeded cloze experiments. In order to investigate the timing effect, our EEG experiment used maximally simple Japanese stimuli such as Bee-nom/acc sting, and it manipulated the time for prediction by changing the temporal interval between the context noun and the target verb without adding any further linguistic content. In order to investigate the task effect, we conducted a speeded cloze study that was matched with our EEG study both in terms of stimuli and the time available for prediction. We found that both the EEG study with additional time for prediction and the speeded cloze study with matched timing showed clear sensitivity to argument roles, while the EEG conditions with less time for prediction replicated the standard pattern of argument role insensitivity. Based on these findings, we propose that lexical prediction is initially insensitive to argument roles but a monitoring mechanism serially inhibits role-inappropriate candidates. This monitoring process operates quickly in production tasks, where it is important to quickly select a single candidate to produce, whereas it may operate more slowly in comprehension tasks, where multiple candidates can be maintained until a continuation is perceived. Computational simulations demonstrate that this mechanism can successfully explain the task and timing effects observed in our experiments.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Number Attraction in Pronoun Production

  2024-05-03

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Pronoun production involves at least two processes: (i) deciding to refer to a referent with a pronoun instead of a full NP and (ii) determining the pronoun’s form. In the present study, we assess whether the second of these processes occurs as a by-product of the first process — namely, does accessing the message-level representation of the referent provide access to the features required to determine pronoun form, meaning that pronouns should be robust to errors, or are pronoun features determined through an agreement operation with the antecedent, in which case they may be susceptible to agreement attraction, similar to subject–verb agreement. Prior lab experiments suggest that pronouns display number attraction at a similar rate to verbs. However, in contrast to verb attraction errors, there is no documentation of systematic pronoun attraction errors in corpora of natural speech. Our study builds upon prior lab work by eliciting pronoun sentences using a scene description paradigm that engages the pronominalization processes involved in natural speech. Across three experiments, we observed small but reliable number attraction effects for pronouns, suggesting that pronoun form is not always determined from the message-level representation of the referent. The elicited error rates were smaller than those previously observed for verbs in a similar scene-description paradigm; this smaller error rate helps to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between pronoun number attraction error rates observed in and outside the lab. The results suggest that pronoun form is determined (at least at times) through an agreement process referencing the features of the linguistic antecedent.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Number and grammatical gender attraction in Spanish pronouns: Evidence for a syntactic route to their features

  2024-10-23

  preprintOpen access

  When a speaker produces a pronoun, they must choose a form that carries the appropriate features. The current study investigates how speakers identify these features. We consider two possible routes: a conceptual-lexical route, whereby pronouns derive their features from the concept of the referent, and a syntactic route, whereby pronoun form is determined through a feature matching operation with the linguistic antecedent. We hypothesize that the use of these two routes should be differentially susceptible to interference from representations other than the pronoun’s referent. We use agreement attraction to distinguish them. In two experiments, we test whether Spanish speakers produce number and grammatical gender attraction errors. We observe small but reliable attraction effects for both features, demonstrating that pronoun formulation can be disrupted by the linguistic representations of nearby nouns. These attraction effects suggest that speakers can use a syntactic route to pronoun form.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Argument Role Sensitivity in Real-Time Sentence Processing: Evidence from a Hybrid Comprehension and Production Task

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2024-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Number Attraction in Pronoun Production

  Open Mind · 2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Pronoun production involves at least two processes: (i) deciding to refer to a referent with a pronoun instead of a full NP and (ii) determining the pronoun's form. In the present study, we assess whether the second of these processes occurs as a by-product of the first process-namely, does accessing the message-level representation of the referent provide access to the features required to determine pronoun form, meaning that pronouns should be robust to errors, or are pronoun features determined through an agreement operation with the antecedent, in which case they may be susceptible to agreement attraction, similar to subject-verb agreement. Prior lab experiments suggest that pronouns display number attraction at a similar rate to verbs. However, in contrast to verb attraction errors, there is no documentation of systematic pronoun attraction errors in corpora of natural speech. Our study builds upon prior lab work by eliciting pronoun sentences using a scene description paradigm that engages the pronominalization processes involved in natural speech. Across three experiments, we observed small but reliable number attraction effects for pronouns, suggesting that pronoun form is not always determined from the message-level representation of the referent. The elicited error rates were smaller than those previously observed for verbs in a similar scene-description paradigm; this smaller error rate helps to reconcile the apparent discrepancy between pronoun number attraction error rates observed in and outside the lab. The results suggest that pronoun form is determined (at least at times) through an agreement process referencing the features of the linguistic antecedent.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Dynamics of Context-Driven Lexical Activation in Children and Adults

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2023-01-01

  preprintOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Why non-native speakers sometimes outperform native speakers in agreement processing

  Bilingualism Language and Cognition · 2022-06-24 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract It is well-known that native English speakers sometimes erroneously accept subject-verb agreement violations when there is a number-matching attractor (e.g., *The key to the cabinets were…). Whether bilinguals whose L1 lacks number agreement are prone to such interference is unclear, given previous studies that report conflicting findings using different structures, participant groups, and experimental designs. To resolve the conflict, we examined highly proficient Korean–English bilinguals’ susceptibility to agreement attraction, comparing prepositional phrase (PP) and relative clause (RC) modifiers in a speeded acceptability judgment task and a speeded forced-choice comprehension task. The bilinguals’ judgments revealed attraction with RCs but not with PPs, while reaction times indicated attraction with both structures. The results therefore showed L2 attraction in all measures, with the consistent exception of judgments for PPs. We argue that this supports an overall native-like agreement processing mechanism, augmented by an additional monitoring mechanism that filters explicit judgments in simple structures.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction

  Annual Review of Linguistics · 2022-01-14

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Bilingualism was once thought to result in cognitive disadvantages, but research in recent decades has demonstrated that experience with two (or more) languages confers a bilingual advantage in executive functions and may delay the incidence of Alzheimer'...Read More

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Sources of argument role insensitivity in verb processing

  NSF · $17k · 2023–2024

• Structure Generation in Language Comprehension

  NSF · $547k · 2009–2015

• Doctoral Dissertation Improvement: Fast and Slow Linguistic Predictions

  NSF · $18k · 2015–2017

• IGERT: Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity

  NSF · $3.0M · 2008–2015

• NRT-DESE: Flexibility in Language Processes and Technology: Human- and Global-Scale

  NSF · $3.1M · 2015–2022

Frequent coauthors

• Nigel Fabb

  University of Strathclyde

  681 shared

• Caroline Heycock

  681 shared

• Andrew Simpson

  Durham University

  680 shared

• Malka Rappaport Hovav

  Hebrew University of Jerusalem

  680 shared

• Andrew Spencer

  University of Essex

  680 shared

• Ruth Horn

  Wellcome Centre for Ethics and Humanities

  680 shared

• Robert D. Borsley

  Bangor University

  680 shared

• James Blevins Cambridge

  Tianjin Normal University

  680 shared

Labs

• CLIPPI

Education

• Ph.D, Linguistics

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  1996

• BA, Modern Languages

  University of Oxford

  1990