Sean Roberts and Justin Quillinan will be running through their talks for Evolang: 11am-12.30, DSB 1.17, talk titles below.
Justin Quillinan: A model of the evolution of frequent social communication
Sean Roberts: Constructing Knowledge: Nomothetic Approaches to Language Evolution
Catriona Silvey, who is a 1st year PhD student in the LEC, is giving the next LEC talk. Room G06, DSB, from 11:00-12:30 on Tuesday February 14th.
Talk title is “Context effects on meaning space structure”, Catriona says “I will argue that the conceptual structure of a given meaning space is not determined solely by perceptible features of the meanings, but is also influenced by factors in the context of language learning and use. These factors can cue learners to weight features unevenly, resulting in a discrepancy between the perceptible features of the meaning space and the features considered relevant by the languge user. This in turn can influence the conceptual structure of the meaning space and the structure of the language. I will present results from an iterated learning experiment that explores this hypothesis.”
Our next LEC talk will by James Thomas, who is a PhD student here in the LEC. It’ll be in room G06, DSB, from 11:00-12:30.
The talk title is ”Self-domestication and language evolution: an overview”, James says “I will present an overview of the argument that human self-domestication played a role in laying the biological foundations that subsequently enabled the emergence of linguistic structure through cultural processes.”
Katie Slocombe (University of York) is giving a short series of guest lectures next week, on animal communication (vocal and gestural communication in the wild, referential communication, signal combinations). These lectures are primarily intended for students on the Masters in the Evolution of Language and Cognition, but all are welcome to attend. The times and venues are as follows:
Wednesday 18th January, 2-3pm, DSB 3.11 [THIS IS ALSO NEXT WEEK'S LEC MEETING]
Wednesday 18th January, 4pm-6pm, DHT Conference Room
Thursday 19th January, 10am-11am, DHT Conference Room
Best wishes,
Kenny Smith
For our last meeting of the year, Kenny Smith will be giving a talk on his work on regularisation entitled:
“Regularization of unpredictable variation”.
1.17 DSB, 11:00-12:30
See you all there, if you’re still around!
Simon
P.S. For bonus points, see if you can spot the unpredictable variation within this message.
Our next LEC talk will be from George Athanasopoulos, a PhD student in the Department of Music. George is particularly keen to see if there are points of contact between his work and ours in the LEC.
It’ll be in room 1.17, DSB, from 11:00-12:30 as usual. His title is:
“Does literacy makes a difference? A cross-cultural study on the graphic representation of music by communities in the United Kingdom, Japan and Papua New Guinea.“
For tomorrow’s LEC talk, Justin Quillinan will be talking about: “Modelling the Evolution of Gossip”. For this talk (and the next two) we’ll be back in 1.17 Dugald Stewart Building. Usual time: 11.00-12.30
See you there!
Simon
***NOTE (EVEN MORE) UNUSUAL ROOM***
For next week’s talk, in his last week at the LEC, Nic will lead a presentation of the work he has been doing in collaboration with Monica and me while he’s been here on his sabbatical. The title is:
“Evidence for selection in the evolution of human communication systems”.
B21, 7 George Square, Tuesday 29th November, 11:00-12:30
See you there!
Simon
After a couple of weeks’ break, we’re back with a talk from Hannah Rohde, our new pragmatics lecturer.
***NOTE UNUSUAL VENUE!***
Nov 22nd, 11:00-12:30, 8.16 David Hume Tower
Conventionalizing ambiguity: Testing predictions of a game-theoretic model of pragmatic inference
Hannah Rohde (joint work with Brady Clark, Gerhard Jaeger, Stefan Kaufmann, & Scott Seyfarth)
Abstract:
In order to understand the emergence of the conventional use of ambiguous forms, we consider predictions from a game-theoretic model of reference production and interpretation. The application of game theory to linguistic phenomena points to the importance of interlocutors’ shared knowledge regarding production costs and the inferencing rules that govern a communication game. The questions we ask are what discourse contexts and what production costs induce speakers to start using (and listeners to start understanding) words whose meaning would otherwise be ambiguous.
In two studies involving real-time two-player communication games, we show that players conventionalize the meaning of otherwise ambiguous words crucially when the cost of uniquely identifying a referent is too high. The rate at which players experiment with and eventually conventionalize the use of ambiguous forms also differs depending on the cost differences among available unambiguous forms. The emerging pattern resembles the well-known conventional implicature in English whereby the less costly expression “some” is taken to mean “some but not all”, but the results suggest that this type of phenomenon need not depend on a fixed lexical host like “some” and can emerge spontaneously among speakers based on the communicative constraints of the discourse.