Archive For The “Uncategorized” Category
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 [...]
Tue 11th January, 11.00-12.30, M3 (room no. 1.05) Appleton Tower Ashley Micklos (UCLA) & Yasamin Motamedi Gestural communication in the laboratory Homesign systems and emerging sign languages offer insight into linguistic systems in their earliest stages of development. Recent research on Nicaraguan Sign Language and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language have allowed an understanding of the [...]
Tue 28th January, 11.00-12.30, M3 (room no. 1.05) Appleton Tower Vanessa Ferdinand On the coevolution of culture and cognition Human behavioral artifacts, such as language, music, institutions, laws, and technologies, all change over time. Why do we use different slang than our parents, why don’t we all know the same songs, and why do we update our software? One [...]
Tue 14th January, 11-12.30, M3 Appleton Tower The lexicon as a dynamical system: Lexical competition and the evolution of phoneme inventories Andrew Wedel (University of Arizona) All human languages make use of small systems of signal categories, such as the sounds [p] and [b], in combination to compose meaningful lexical categories, such as the words ‘pat’ [...]
Tuesday 17th, 11-12.30, Room 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building Input variability as a mechanism for social structure determination of linguistic complexity Mark Atkinson Abstract: While non-linguistic features of a speech community have been shown to correlate with degrees of linguistic complexity, the explanatory mechanism(s) by which they could have such an influence has not yet been [...]
***NOTE UNUSUAL START TIME*** Tue 10th December, 11.30-1.00, B21 7 George Square Functionalism and Its Discontents Kevin Stadler Functional explanations of language features have not only regained appeal in the past decades by their reframing in evolutionary (read: selectionist) terms, they’ve also recently been joined by newly discovered relationships between linguistic features such as grammatical [...]