Jean E. Fox Tree

Who is Jean E. Fox Tree?

Jean E. Fox Tree is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. Fox Tree studies collateral signals that people use in spontaneous speech, such as fillers, prosodic information, fillers, and speech disfluencies.

Traditionally, such phenomena were given little attention by scholars, either because they were viewed as flaws in speech to be avoided or ignored, or because many psycholinguistic studies focused on speech that was prepared in advance rather than spontaneous speech. Rather than unwanted errors, Fox Tree’s research has shown that collateral signals are actually meaningful and relevant to both speaker and listener, and that removing them from speech might actually diminish comprehension.

This view counters that proposed by Noam Chomsky, the well known linguist from MIT who regarded such utterances as errors in performance and not part of proper language. In Fox Tree’s view, however, collateral signals are essential to successful communication in everyday situations and are beneficial to listeners.