My research program is driven by a fundamental observation: across all major empirical domains, sentences consistently exhibit gradient patterns, as reflected in graded acceptability judgments, speakers’ gradient ability to comprehend the meaning of sentences that deviate from idealized grammatical forms, and in the gradient patterns observed in online sentence processing measures (reading times, eye-movements, electrophysiological responses). Despite its pervasiveness, gradience has traditionally been treated as a by-product of extra-grammatical factors, under the assumption that grammar itself is strictly categorical. My research takes a different stance and explores the consequences of the idea that gradient effects reflect the internal architecture of grammar itself. . Leveraging empirical examples of gradience, my work investigates whether grammar is categorical or continuous, and whether the parser relies on a single mechanism to process grammatical and ungrammatical sentences, or whether distinct mechanisms are involved.
At the empirical level, my research focuses on core syntactic phenomena that exhibit a gradient behavior, such as island effects. I probe gradience through a variety of experimental techniques, such as acceptability judgments, self-paced reading, maze task, and speed-accuracy trade off (SAT), and I employ advanced statistical methods that can allow us to precisely estimate the magnitude of violation sizes, such as Bayesian methods.
At the theoretical level, while my work engages broadly with models of grammar, processing, and their interaction, exploring the full space of possible accounts of gradience (whether the grammar is categorical or continuous, and whether sentence processing engages distinct mechanisms for grammatical and ungrammatical sentence), I have been particularly involved in the development of a novel and computationally-formal theory of continuous grammar, the Self-Organized Sentence Processing model (SOSP), which offers a principled explanation of gradience within the grammar, while providing an explicit theory of parsing and structure building (e.g., Villata & Tabor 2022).
Sandra Villata 