Archive For The “Uncategorized” Category
Jennifer Culbertson has joined the LEC as a Chancellor’s Fellow. Jenny works on the relationship between biases in language learning biases and typological universals, using artificial language learning and computational modelling techniques. We are very excited to have her on the team – welcome aboard Jenny!
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 [...]
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: [...]