Michael Tanenhaus

Michael Tanenhaus is an American psycholinguist, author, and lecturer. He is the Beverly Petterson Bishop and Charles W. Bishop Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics at the University of Rochester. From 1996-2000 and 2003-2009 he served as Director of the Center for Language Sciences at the University of Rochester.

Tanenhaus’s research focuses on processes which underlie real-time spoken language and reading comprehension. He is also interested in the relationship between linguistic and various non-linguistic contexts.

Michael K. Tanenhaus grew up in New York and Iowa City. He was raised in a home conducive to academics and learning. His father was a political scientist and his mother always surrounded the family with books and literature. Tanenhaus's siblings include New York Times Book Review Editor Sam Tanenhaus, filmmaker Beth Tanenhaus Winsten, and Legal Historian David S. Tanenhaus. Tanenhaus obtained his Bachelor of Science from the University of Iowa in Speech Pathology and Audiology after a brief stint at Antioch College. Tanenhaus received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1978. He immediately began teaching as an Assistant Professor, and then an Associate Professor at Wayne State University. Tanenhaus joined the faculty at the University of Rochester in 1983. He continues to be an involved researcher and faculty member who teaches courses on language processing and advises students. Since 2003 he has also been the Director of the Center for Language Sciences.

"While Tanenhaus was not the first to notice the connection between eye movements and attention, he and his team were the first to systematically record how the technology could be used to analyze language comprehension," notes Hauser (2004, p. 2). The MTanLab uses head-mounted eye-tracking devices, which can be worn like visors around the head. The apparatus tracks pupil and corneal reflections, and once calibrated, can accurately tell researchers where someone wearing the device is looking. Researchers use this information to make inferences about the subjects' cognitive processes, since shifts in gaze are related to shifts in attention. Just and Carpenter (1980) hypothesized that there is “no appreciable lag between what is fixated and what is processed (p. 331).” Thus the Visual World Paradigm can be used to understand the time-course of spoken language comprehension and the role visual context can play in language understanding.

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