Michael K. Tanenhaus

Michael K. Tanenhaus is a leader in the field of psycholinguistics, investigating how listeners or readers develop interpretations of linguistic material without waiting for the ends of words, phrases or sentences. His work focuses on mechanisms underlying real-time language comprehension, spanning traditional subfields of speech perception, word recognition, sentence processing, experimental pragmatics, and discourse and conversation. He uses ambiguity resolution as a vehicle for examining how information is coordinated during real-time language processing.

Tanenhaus pioneered the use of eye tracking as a methodology for monitoring spoken language comprehension. His ongoing work focuses on how factors such as prosody, goals and intentions, and tracking of an interlocutor's knowledge help in constructing and updating referential domains in interactive conversation. He is the author of two books including Lexical Ambiguity Resolution: Perspective from Psycholinguistics, Neuropsychology, and Artificial Intelligence (1988) and Approaches to Studying World-Situated Language Use: Bridging the Language and Product and Language as Action Traditions (2004). He is currently the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester, where he is also the Director of the Center for Language Sciences.