Archive For The “Uncategorized” Category
I will be talking about some recent modelling work I’ve been doing that suggests that “Linguistic structure is an evolutionary trade-off between simplicity and expressivity”. Tuesday 26th, 11am, DSB 1.17. “Linguistic structure is an evolutionary trade-off between simplicity and expressivity” Language exhibits structure: a species-unique system for expressing complex meanings using complex forms. We present [...]
Nic Fay is in town and will give us a bonus LEC talk on “Evidence for the cumulative cultural evolution of human communication systems”. Friday 22nd February, 4pm-5.30pm, DSB 1.17. Abstract below. Evidence for the cumulative cultural evolution of human communication systems Biological evolution has endowed humans with a second inheritance system that allows people to socially [...]
[This was originally scheduled for 12th Feb, but was rescheduled] Olga Feher will be giving a talk on ”The development and evolution of song culture”. Tuesday 19th, 11am, DSB 1.17. Abstract below. The development and evolution of song culture Similarly to humans, songbirds learn their songs by imitating adult individuals and achieve complex vocal behaviour gradually [...]
Prof. Vera Kempe is visiting from the University of Abertay Dundee, and will give a talk on “Exploring Iterated Language Learning in Children”, detailing some recent work she’s been doing to adapt the method from the Kirby, Cornish & Smith (2008) PNAS paper for kids. Tuesday 5th February, 11am, DSB 1.17.
Rachael Bailes will give a talk about a paper she’s working on: “Levels of analysis in the common ground debate”, Tuesday 29th January, 11am, DSB 1.17.
Olga Fehér has joined the LEC on a prestigious Newton Fellowship. Olga is most famous for her research on zebra finches, in which she implemented for the first time an experimentally-controlled analog of cultural transmission of song from an initial non-typical starting point. In essence, this was experimental iterated learning of bird song. You can [...]
We’ll kick off 2013 with a talk from Vanessa Ferdinand: “How we lose variation through learning: on the domain-generality of linguistic regularization biases”, Tuesday 15th January, 11am, DSB 1.17.
For our last LEC meeting of the year, Chris Petkov (http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/chris.petkov/) and Ben Wilson (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/cbe/postgrad/phd/wilson.htm) will give a talk on “Artificial grammar learning and the nonhuman primate brain: Perspectives from marmosets, macaques and chimps”. Tuesday 18th December, 11am-12.30, DSB 1.17.
Gary Lupyan (http://sapir.psych.wisc.edu/) will deliver a Masterclass on the 27th and 28th November. Masterclasses are intended specifically for students on the MSc in the Evolution of Language and Cognition, although everyone is welcome to attend Tuesday 27th November, 11am-1pm, DSB 1.17, “The meaning of nonsense words: sound symbolism, iconicity, and crossmodal mappings” Wednesday 28th November, 10am-11am, [...]