Colloquium (11/1/2012): Terry Au (University of Hong Kong)
LingLang Lunch (1/29/2014): Anna Shusterman (Wesleyan University)
LingLang Lunch (4/30/2014): Jill Thorson (Brown University)
LingLang Lunch (11/4/2015): Matt Hall (University of Connecticut)
LingLang Lunch (3/9/2016): Emily Myers (University of Connecticut)
LingLang Lunch (4/29/2016): Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester)
I’ll present a medley of case studies on this question, which hopefully will make for some interesting discussion. I’ll begin with a computational study on the syntax of five languages: do the grammars of these languages order information in such a way that makes the language easier to process than expected by chance (Gildea & Jaeger, 2015)? I then present work on miniature artificial language learning to show that the biases we observe in the first study operate during language acquisition, and that they are strong enough to bias learners to deviate from the input language towards languages that are easier to process and encode information more efficiently (Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport, 2012; Fedzechkina, Newport, & Jaeger, 2016; Fedzechkina & Jaeger, under review). Time permitting, I’ll also show how related biases might cause change within a speaker’s production through that speaker’s life time (suggesting a second path through which language processing can affect language change, Buz, Tanenhaus, & Jaeger, 2016). Alternatively, I can show how adaptive processes during language understanding continuously reshape our linguistic representations throughout our life (Fine, Jaeger, Farmer & Qian, 2013; Kleinschmidt & Jaeger, 2015), including the acquisition of new (e.g., dialectal) syntax (Fraundorf & Jaeger, under review). Come prepared to vote (and to be over voted).
LingLang Lunch (10/19/2016): Matt Masapollo (Brown University)
Colloquium (11/2/2016): Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland)
Colloquium (05/02/2018): Sandra Waxman (Northwestern University)
Becoming human: How (and how early) do infants link language and cognition?