Archive For The “Uncategorized” Category
Tuesday 1 December, 11:00–12:30 Room 1.17, DSB Klaas Seinhorst, Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication, University of Amsterdam Filling in the blanks – acquisition meets typology It has often been observed that languages disprefer gaps in their phoneme inventories: they tend to maximally combine their distinctive features. In the late 1960s, the French phonologist André [...]
Tuesday 24 November, 11:00–12:30 Room 1.17, DSB Alan Nielsen Systematicity, contrastiveness, and learnability: Evidence from a growing lexicon experiment Typically, experiments exploring the degree to which systematicity and motivatedness compare the learnability of complete artificial lexica to one another, concluding that associations between words and meanings that are systematic create learnability penalties at certain sizes. [...]
Tuesday 27 October, 11:00–12:30 Room 1.17, DSB Simon Kirby (work with Tessa Verhoef and Carol Padden, UCSD) Naturalness and Systematicity: Evidence from artificial sign language Language is shaped by cognitive biases. These biases can influence the emergence of linguistic structure through multiple linking mechanisms: improvisation of novel solutions to communicative tasks; repeated interaction between communicating [...]
NOTE UNUSUAL DAY AND TIME Friday 23 October, 16:00–17:30 Room 1.17, DSB Jelle Zuidema, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, University of Amsterdam Deep learning models of language processing and the evolution of syntax Researchers that assume discrete, symbolic models of syntax, tend to reject gradualist accounts in favor of a ‘saltationist’ view, where the [...]
Tuesday 13th October, 11:00–12:30 Room 1.17, DSB Jenny Culbertson Language learning and word order regularities: Children’s errors reflect a typological preference for harmonic patterns Much recent debate in cognitive science concerns whether language universals exist and whether there is a connection between language acquisition, language change, and linguistic typology. However, recent studies have made important [...]
NOTE UNUSUAL DAY, TIME, AND LOCATION Friday 2nd October, 14:00–15:30 Informatics Forum, 4.31/4.33 Ted Gibson, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT Information theoretic approaches to language universals Finding explanations for the observed variation in human languages is the primary goal of linguistics, and promises to shed light on the nature of human cognition. One [...]
Tuesday 22nd September, 11:00–12:30 Room 1.17, DSB Olga Fehér Structural priming in an artificial language I am going to talk about a study that used artificial language learning paradigms to investigate structural priming (coordination with the syntactic structure of the partner’s previous utterance) during communicative interaction. We trained participants on artificial languages exhibiting unpredictable variation [...]
LEC founder Prof. Jim Hurford has been elected to the British Academy, in recognition of his outstanding research. Congratulations Jim!
Tuesday 9th June, Room 1.17, DSB, 11:05-12:30pm Jon W. Carr The emergence of categorical and compositional structure in an open-ended meaning space Language facilitates the division of the world into discrete, arbitrary categories. This categorical structure reduces an intractable, infinite space of meanings to a tractable, finite set of categories. By sufficiently aligning on a [...]