Author Archives: Kevin
Tue 13th May, 11.00-12.30, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building Carmen Saldaña À la recherche des primitives, perdus: emergence and evolution of categories in syntax Ever since Chomsky’s Three models for the description of language (1956), the field of linguistics has taken hierarchical processing and the underlying implementation of recursion to be elements of focus in the [...]
Tue 6th May, 11.00-12.30, 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building Monica Tamariz Evidence for selection in the evolution of human communication systems Human communication systems evolve, but the cultural evolutionary mechanisms that drive their evolution are not well understood. To better understand them, we constructed a parameterized mixed probabilistic model of the spread of communicative variants in [...]
Tue 22nd April, 11.00-12.30, room 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building Sander Lestrade (Radboud University Nijmegen) Modeling (the development of) argument-marking systems A fundamental task for language is to provide the rules to map meaning to form. In the communication of an event, these rules should link semantic roles, such as agent and patient, to their grammatical [...]
The final session of dry runs for the Evolang conference – everyone welcome, titles below! Tue 8th April, 11.00-12.30, Room 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building Jon Carr: The cumulative cultural evolution of category structure in an infinite meaning space Justin Sulik: Symbolisation and cognition Bill Thompson & Catriona Silvey: The effect of communication on category structure
Three more dry runs for the Evolang conference – everyone welcome, titles below! Tue 1st April, 11.00-12.30, Room G.04, David Hume Tower (DHT Conference Room) Simon Kirby, Hannah Cornish, Kenny Smith: Systems emerge: The cultural evolution of interdependent sequential behaviours in the lab Matt Spike: Minimal requirements for the emergence of learned signalling Kevin Stadler: [...]
Three more dry runs for the Evolang conference tomorrow – everyone welcome, titles below! Tue 25th March, 11.00-12.30, Room G.04, David Hume Tower (DHT Conference Room) Caroline Kamps & Vanessa Ferdinand: The origins of regularity in language: why coordination matters James Winters: Experimentally investigating the role of context in the structuring of the linguistic system [...]
Tue 18th March, 11.00-12.30, M3 (room no. 1.05) Appleton Tower Alan Nielsen: Motivated vs. conventional systematicity: implications for language learning and the structure of the lexicon Marieke Schouwstra: About time: Semantic structure in emerging language Monica Tamariz: Investigating the role of iconicity in the evolution of linguistic structure
Tue 11th March, 11.00-12.30, M3 (room no. 1.05) Appleton Tower Kenny Smith Eliminating unpredictable linguistic variation through interaction Languages tend not to exhibit unpredictable variation. We explore alignment/accommodation during interaction as a mechanism to explain this cross-linguistic tendency. Specifically, we test the hypothesis (derived from historical linguistics) that interactions between categorical and variable users are [...]
Tue 4th March, 11.00-12.30, M3 (room no. 1.05) Appleton Tower Marieke Woensdregt (Universiteit van Amsterdam) I know what you did last iteration – Modelling the role of theory of mind in communication Theory of mind – the ability to reason about the mental states of others – plays an important role in human communication. To [...]
Tue 25th February, 11.00-12.30, Room G.04, David Hume Tower (DHT Conference Room) Matt Spike Lost in Transmission? The information dynamics of signalling games. The ability to bootstrap learned communication systems without any apparent organisation has been shown in numerous experiments (eg. Fay et al. 2013) and models (eg. Steels 1999), and by the modern emergence [...]