We’ll kick off the new semester with a talk by Alan Nielsen, “Systematicity and the structure of the lexicon: Implications for learning and the evolution of language”, Tuesday 18th September, 11am, DSB 1.17.
Simon Kirby will be previewing a 30-minute talk he’ll be giving at an upcoming Wenner-Gren Symposium: “Cultural transmission explains why language and other human behaviours have structure”, Monday 3rd September, 11am, DSB 1.17. Note unusual day and time!
Keelin will be previewing a 45-minute talk she’ll be giving later in the day at the Institute for Music in Human Social Development: ”Did Music precede language in human evolution? Empirical Tests”, 11am-12.30, DSB 1.17.
Katja, who is a visiting MSc student from the University of Amsterdam, will be talking about the work she’s been doing in her time here: “From Gestures to Signs: Iconicity, Regularization, Embodiment”, 11am-12.30, DSB 1.17.
I’ll be talking about some early-stage joint work with Tim O’Donnell (MIT) on the effects of irregulars on learnability. “Irregular forms make learning easier”, 11am-12.30, DSB 1.17.
Quentin Atkinson is visiting the LEC on MONDAY 4th June. Quentin’s high-profile and provocative work bridges language change, evolutionary biology, cultural evolution, religion, cooperation, and human expansion from Africa. For example, 200 pages of a recent issue of Linguistic Typology were recently set aside for responses to a 3-page Science article he wrote.
He’s now based in New Zealand, so it’s great to get a chance to chat to him in person!
Here’s the plan for the day:
11-12.30: Talk, 1.17 DSB – “Modelling language evolution through time and space”. In this talk, Quentin will be covering some new work using phylogeographic methods to trace the geographic expansion of European languages.
12.30 – 2: Lunch, all welcome.
2 onwards: Meetings with LEC members to hear about our work (anyone else is also welcome to meet Quentin during this afternoon too – just get in touch with me!)
And here’s Quentin’s home page for those who don’t know his work.
Cheers,
Simon
Joint LEC/P-workshop talk by Dan Silverman (San Jose State University), on “Evolution of the speech code: higher-order symbolism and the linguistic Big Bang”. Tuesday 29th May, 11am-12.30, DSB 1.17.
Bonus Friday talk by Doug Martin (Aberdeen University), “On the origin of stereotypes”. Doug is a social psychologist using iterated learning to study the processes by which social stereotypes are formed – slightly outside the LEC’s remit, but should be fun. Friday 25th May, 11am-12, DSB 1.17.
Talk by Tessa Verhoef (University of Amsterdam), “Does iconicity influence the emergence of combinatorial structure in artificial whistled languages?”. Tuesday 22nd May, 11am-12.30, DSB 1.17.
There’s a nice overview of the general turn towards experimental approaches in evolutionary linguistics by groups such as the LEC in Science this week.
Simon