Alan will be talking about his PhD research on “Arbitrariness of the sign revisited: An examination of the role of phonological similarity in an artificial language learning paradigm”. Tuesday 23rd April, 11am, back in our usual venue of DSB 1.17. Abstract below.

“Arbitrariness of the sign revisited: An examination of the role of phonological similarity in an artificial language learning paradigm”

Systematic mappings between forms and meanings have been shown in a number of recent studies to provide benefits for learning; isomorphisms between form and meaning allow participants to easily learn category membership, but are potentially confounding for the learning of individual tokens. Typically, the systematic form-meaning mappings that have been explored use labels where within category the phonology of the words is similar; in these cases not only are the form-meaning mappings systematic, but the languages are also substructurally systematic. In this talk I will present the results of an experiment and a connectionist model that compare these phonologically structured systematic languages to systematic languages were phonology is not isomorphic to or predictive of meaning.

• «Previous Post
• Next Post »

---