Archive For The “Uncategorized” Category
This will be a dry run of Cat’s AMLAP talk: Communication leads to the emergence of sub-optimal category structures Words divide the world into labelled categories. Languages vary in the categories they label, sometimes to the point of making cross-cutting divisions of the same domain (e.g. spatial relations: Choi, McDonough, Bowerman, & Mandler, 1999). A [...]
Tuesday 13 August, 11am DSB 1.17 Multiple routes to solving the word mapping problem Molly Lewis mll@stanford.edu Mapping a novel word to its referent is an under-constrained problem. To successfully learn words, children must therefore approach this problem with certain biases. In the literature, two classes of biases have broadly been proposed: in-the-moment pragmatic inferences and higher-order [...]
Chris Sharratt interviews Simon Kirby about his experiences with the Edinburburgh art collective, Found, for the Guardian newspaper. Art and science: ‘different ways of engaging with what matters’
Andrea will be giving a talk about his ongoing modelling and experimental workwork: “Who’s got Rhythm?: Understanding the Roots of Musical Timing Abilities”. Friday 14th, 4pm, DSB 3.10. Abstract below. —– “Who’s got Rhythm?: Understanding the Roots of Musical Timing Abilities” Rhythm and synchronization are important concepts in musicology, linguistics, biology and physics. In this [...]
Niki will be giving a talk on “Accommodation & Grammaticalization: or how syntactic structures become obligatory”, Tuesday 11th, 11am, DSB 1.17, abstract below. —– “Accommodation & Grammaticalization: or how synatic structures become obligatory” This talk tries to relate the insight that grammaticalisation processes often come to embed lexical items into rigid syntactic structures with accomodation theory. Accomodation [...]
ELC Masterclass 6th-7th June: “Primate communication: links to human language”
By Kenny | May 30, 2013
Dr. Katie Slocombe (York) is in town on the 6th and 7th June, and will give a masterclass on “Primate communication: links to human language”. These lectures are aimed at students on the Masters in the Evolution of Language and Cognition, but everyone is welcome to attend – places are limited by the size of the [...]
Matt Spike (1st year PhD student) will be giving this week’s LEC talk, on “What can linguistic convention tell us about the cultural evolution of language?”. Tuesday 4th June 11am, DSB 1.17. Abstract below. “What can linguistic convention tell us about the cultural evolution of language?” While every human language is highly systematic, no two [...]
In a bonus LEC talk, Christian Rutz (St Andrews) will talk about his work with New Caledonian Crows. Friday 31st, 11am, DSB 1.17.
Prof. Nikolaus Ritt (Vienna), who is visiting us for 6 months, will give a masterclass on “Language change as cultural evolution”. These lectures are aimed at students on the Masters in the Evolution of Language and Cognition, but everyone is welcome to attend – places are limited by the size of the room though, so [...]
James Winters, who is in the first year of his PhD with us, will be giving a talk: “It’s all just noise: Redundancy as a lower-bound on the emergence of systematicity”, Tuesday 14th May, 11am, DSB 1.17. Abstract below. For this talk I will discuss the concept of redundancy and how it relates to the [...]