Author Archives: Kevin
Tuesday 7th October, 11am-12:30, DSB 1.17 Jennifer Culbertson Distinctions among cue types in semantically-based noun class learning Work on natural language noun class acquisition suggests that phonological information – even if less reliable – may be privileged over semantics (e.g., Gagliardi, 2012). If phonological information is available to the child before meaning, then any privilege [...]
Tuesday 30th September 11.00-12.30, room 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building The Dynamics of Social Learning on Undirected Networks Andrew Whalen (University of St. Andrews) Social networks, and dynamics of processes operating over them have been an exciting area of recent research. However in a wide variety of theoretically interesting processes relating to language and cultural evolution, [...]
*** Note unusual room *** Tues 23rd September, 11am – 12:30, Lecture theatre 5, 7 Bristo Square Olga Feher Social influences on the regularisation of unpredictable linguistic variation Languages tend not to exhibit unpredictable variation, and learners receiving variable linguistic input tend to eliminate it, making the language more regular. We explore how this behavior [...]
*** Note unusual room *** Tuesday 16th September, 11am – 12:30, Lecture theatre 5, 7 Bristo Square Marieke Schouwstra Basic word order: from natural order to convention in silent gesture Interest in the origins of basic word order in human language has increased dramatically over the last five or six years. I will present my [...]
Tues 9th September 11am-12.30, DSB 1.17 Isabelle Dautriche (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique) Title: Dealing with ambiguity in the lexicon: a challenge for language acquisition Abstract: The lexicon is ambiguous: word forms can have several meanings (homophones) and form a highly connected network in the phonological space with regions of high neighborhood density. While [...]
Tuesday 19th August 11.00-12.30, room 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building Alex Papadopoulos-Korfiatis A dynamical systems approach to iterated learning Both dynamical systems accounts of cognition and the Iterated Learning model of language evolution can be regarded as holistic, systemic approaches that base their explanatory power on the interaction of a number of factors. A potential combination [...]
Tue 8th July, 11.00-12.30, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building Monica Tamariz Cultural transmission: behaviours replicate; mental and material culture emerge Human culture evolves, but it is also remarkably stable over time. In order to explain this stability, we need to understand how cultural information is transmitted from generation to generation. Human culture has been defined as [...]
*** two LEC talks next week, note slightly unusual starting time for both *** Tue 17th June, 11.30-13.00, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building James Winters Heuristic-driven strategies in communication games and their implications for the emergence of structure in language So far, both communication game and iterated learning experiments have focused on macro-level properties and their [...]
*** NOTE UNUSUAL DAY AND TIME *** Mon 9th June, 14.00-15.30, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building Bart de Boer (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Cognitive adaptations to rapidly changing culture can evolve This talk contributes to the study of what kind of cognitive adaptations to rapidly changing cultural traits can evolve. It introduces a mathematical approach (mean field [...]
Tue 20th May, 11.00-12.30, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building Vanessa Ferdinand What drives regularity in human language? Languages evolve as they pass through generations of learners’ minds and adapt to selection pressures exerted by our cognitive architecture and learning biases. In this talk, I focus on one such pressure: our linguistic regularization bias, which drives learners [...]