Archive For The “Uncategorized” Category
Tuesday 26th, 11-12.30, B21 7 George Square Motivated vs. conventional systematicity: Implications for language learning and the structure of the lexicon Alan Nielsen Given that the task of language learning involves pressures for both learnability and communicative accuracy, one might expect that, contra to the linguistic dogma of arbitrariness, systematic mappings between signals and meanings [...]
Tuesday 19th November, 11-12.30, B21 7 George Square The elimination of unpredictable variation is dependent on speaker identity Olga Feher Natural languages do not normally exhibit unpredictable variation, which is when an object is labelled by two or more words that are used interchangeably in a random manner. Synonyms are common but their use is [...]
Time: 11-12.30, Tuesday 12th November Place: B21 7 George Square Semantic structure and emerging conventions in silent gesture Marieke Schouwstra When individuals do not share a common language, they cannot reliably use existing linguistic conventions when they communicate. This is is the case in, e.g., unsupervised second language acquisition and home sign. I will briefly [...]
Tuesday 29th October, 11.00-12.30, B21 7 George Square Klaas Seinhorst – The learnability of phoneme inventories I will present my PhD project “The learnability of phoneme inventories”, which I started at the University of Amsterdam in September 2012. The starting point of my project was the observation that languages have strong preferences for certain sets [...]
Tuesday 22nd October, 11-12.30, B21 7 George Square Model Fitting and Prediction for Language Evolution: Quirks and Opportunities Bill Thompson Questions concerning the origins of linguistic structures are increasingly being studied by means of artificial language learning experiments. Central to this enterprise is the drive to uncover cognitive biases that shape the evolution of linguistic [...]
Bill has unfortunately had to postpone his talk next week, so I will be stepping in to give a short presentation about some of the work that Kenny and I have been doing on analysing iterated artificial sign language experiments. It’s really fun and rich data, and we’d like your input on how to tackle [...]
Tue 24th September, 11.00-12.30, B21 7 George Square Experimental and theoretical models of cultural evolution Marius Kempe, University of Durham Abstract: I will talk about two experimental and two theoretical models of cultural evolution. In the first experiment, I test the hypothesis that increasing group size speeds up cultural accumulation, using a novel puzzle-solving task [...]
Dr Kenny Smith has been promoted to a Readership in Language Evolution out of the normal cycle of promotions in recognition of his world-leading research in language evolution. Congratulations, Kenny!
We’re starting the new semester of LEC talks with a short talk from Cem Bozsahin, an old friend of the LEC who is passing through Edinburgh. This will be a dry run for a talk at the Philosophy and Theory of AI conference, so we can expect the meeting to take substantially less than an [...]
Michael Dunn has joined the LEC as our new Professorial Fellow. Michael works on phylogenetic approaches to language and has an appointment at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He will be working for the University of Edinburgh part-time, developing research collaborations and teaching our postgraduate students. We are very excited to have him join [...]