Archive For The “Uncategorized” Category
Tues 11th November, 11am-12:30, DSB 1.17 Yasamin Motamedi The emergence of systematic structure in artificial gestural communication systems Languages exhibit systematic structure: signals are not independent of each other but form part of a system. Previous work has shown that the emergence of systematic structure increases learnability of a system, and the pressures of transmission [...]
Tuesday 14th October, 11am-12:30, DSB 1.17 Joe Fruehwald How Phonetic Changes Happen In this talk, I’ll walk through a careful case study of a change in pronunciation that took place in Philadelphia across the 20th century which is based on acoustic analysis of archival recordings. The goal is to revisit some first principles about how [...]
Very best of luck to Vanessa Ferdinand, Catriona Silvey and Bill Thompson, who have finished up their PhDs in the LEC and headed off to fantastic post-doc positions elsewhere. Vanessa (thesis title: “Inductive Evolution: the cognitive explanation of cultural change and regularity in language”) is off to the Santa Fe Institute, to take up an Omidyar [...]
Congratulations to Dr James Thomas and Dr Justin Sulik, who were awarded their PhDs this week. James did his PhD with Simon Kirby and Richard Shillcock (Informatics), on “Self-domestication and Language Evolution”; since his PhD he has been working as a post-doc with Richard. Justin was supervised by Kenny Smith and Jim Hurford, and his [...]
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 [...]