Professor of Linguistics, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science, University of Maryland, College Park Optical illusions are visually compelling and also help to reveal the inner workings of the visual system. This presentation demonstrates how linguistic illusions can be similarly revealing about how humans mentally perceive and encode language. Linguistic illusions are situations where people systematically mis-interpret, mis-hear, or mis-judge sounds, words, or sentences, arriving at interpretations that are unintended, or perceiving ungrammatical sentences as if they are well formed. Importantly, linguistic illusions are not simply the product of a human language system that is uniformly unreliable or gullible: speakers show impressive sensitivity in many domains, which makes the illusions all the more striking. Dr. Phillips and his colleagues at the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Laboratory are pioneers in the use of lab-based methods to understand the mental basis of grammatical rules and constraints. His team”s research takes them to countries throughout the world, where they test typologically diverse languages. Phillips directs the University of Maryland”s new interdisciplinary graduate training program on the Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity, supported by an award from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The program combines theoretical, computational, educational, neurocognitive, clinical, and engineering approaches to language science. He also co-directs the Maryland Neuroimaging Center. He has an undergraduate degree in medieval German from Oxford University and a Ph.D. degree in linguistics from MIT.