Most people can recognize what words are real and which ones aren’t in the languages they know. However, sometimes a nonsense word might sneak through, especially when the word sounds and looks a lot like a legitimate one.

Karthik Durvasula, Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures at Michigan State University, is delving further into “wordlikeness judgments” through a new research project supported by a $480,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Starting this fall, Durvasula has been scaling up experiments to collect data and apply computational models to deepen the understanding of human perception and knowledge in relationship to language.

“Modern generative linguists want to know about the knowledge that people have when they know a language,” Durvasula said. “We want to understand that knowledge, how it is represented in our minds, and how we deploy that knowledge when we use it to speak and understand others.”

Read the full story on the College of Arts and Letters website.