Gary S. Dell

Research asks how people produce and understand sentences using sophisticated behavioral measures and rigorous computational models. He is the first researcher to systematically use speech errors in the lab as a paradigm for studying the mechanisms underlying speech production, including what the units of production are. He is also the first to use connectionist models (spreading activation through a network) to evaluate competing theories of speech production by making predictions about the types and frequencies of speech errors that should occur, and he is one of the first to account for properties of aphasia by damaging a neural network.