“Alyson Abel points to a tangle of red, green and blue lines on a graph. Each is a bit like a printout from a lie detector test.
The squiggly lines mean her research subject was stumped — repeatedly — by sentences like these: “I need a footstool for my gouse. She drinks milk from a gouse. You bring the drinks and I’ll bring the gouse.”
Abel is an assistant professor in San Diego State University’s School of Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences. She runs a lab where she studies brain responses to get a better picture of how we go from hearing a new word to understanding what it means.”