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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230512T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230512T130000
DTSTAMP:20230509T160242Z
CREATED:20230306T173208Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230509T160242Z
UID:41073-1683889200-1683896400@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Jennifer Kuo
DESCRIPTION:Location: Haines Hall 220 \nWhen phonological learning is not statistical: how learning biases have reshaped Malagasy paradigms \nOne view of phonological learning is that it is driven by a domain-general bias towards frequency-matching\, and therefore predictable from statistical distributions of the language (Albright 2002; Ernestus & Baayen 2003; Nosofsky 2011). A competing view is that learning is influenced by various linguistically-motivated biases\, such as a bias towards less complex patterns. One way to tease apart these effects is to look at how learners behave when presented with conflicting data patterns––they do not always replicate the language they hear from their parents\, and their errors (such as goed instead of went) can be informative\, telling us about what biases are present in learning. Such errors can be adopted into speech communities and passed through generations of speakers\, resulting in reanalysis of a data pattern. \nIn this talk\, I look at reanalyses over time in Malagasy and show that reanalysis is not entirely predictable from statistical distributions. Instead\, I argue that Malagasy reanalysis is sensitive to both frequency-matching and a markedness bias\, using an iterated version of Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky 1986; Goldwater & Johnson\, 2003) that simulates the cumulative effect of reanalyses across generations of speakers. I further propose that the markedness effects active in reanalysis are restricted to those already present in the language as a phonotactic tendency\, and show that this is the case for Malagasy. These results demonstrate how findings from language change over time\, combined with quantitative modeling\, can give us insight into phonological learning.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-jennifer-kuo/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230519T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230519T130000
DTSTAMP:20230517T220847Z
CREATED:20220919T182704Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230517T220847Z
UID:38414-1684494000-1684501200@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Xin Xie
DESCRIPTION:Location: Haines Hall 220 \nWhat is “adapted” in adaptive speech perception? \nThe acoustic-phonetic realization of the same linguistic categories (e.g.\, phonemes\, syllables\, or words) can vary considerably both within and across talkers. This variability poses a challenge for listeners\, who must be able to perceive speech accurately despite these changes. Empirical data suggest that listeners adapt to cross-talker variability. Exactly how this adaptivity is achieved remains unknown. Three hypotheses have been proposed: (1) low-level\, pre-linguistic signal normalization\, (2) changes in linguistic representations\, or (3) changes in post-perceptual decision-making. However\, no study has directly compared these hypotheses. \nI will present a computational framework for adaptive speech perception (ASP for brevity) that implements all three hypotheses and use it to derive predictions for experiments on perception. We find that the signature results of influential experimental paradigms do not distinguish between the three hypotheses\, highlighting the need for new research methods. I will then discuss new approaches for investigating how these mechanisms—together and separately—guide the impressive adaptivity in human speech perception.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/xin-xie/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230526T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230526T130000
DTSTAMP:20230601T211837Z
CREATED:20220919T182031Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230601T211837Z
UID:38403-1685098800-1685106000@linguistics.ucla.edu
SUMMARY:Colloquium: Ellen Lau
DESCRIPTION:Representing individuals\n\n\n\n\n\nIn this talk I will consider what is known about how the human mind and brain represents individuals non-linguistically\, and what the implications are for our theories of linguistic interpretation. In standard model-theoretic semantics\, individuals are simply taken for granted as part of the world model; and I too will assume that the world itself contains individual entities. But if we take seriously the goal of developing a theory of the natural language semantics that is instantiated in the human mind\, we need to know something about how the mind manages to *approximate* the world in mental representation\, because it is this mental representation of the world to which natural language has to be mapped. As Bach (1989) noted\, this is as challenging for individuals as for anything else. Although cognitive neuroscience is still in its infancy\, today some rough outlines of how the brain represents individuals are becoming clearer. There appear to be multiple\, redundant\, non-linguistic representations of individuals in circuits that evolved for different purposes and which differ in format and temporal continuity. Some of our representations of individuals are fleeting\, serving the purpose of helping us to accurately represent the structure of a current situation or interaction while it is happening. Others\, supported by different brain circuits\, are designed to last a longer period of time\, allowing us to re-identify a recently encountered individual and successfully integrate new knowledge about them with prior knowledge. Yet a different form of representation for known individuals is included within the semi-permanent long-term knowledge base that also supports generalized knowledge. Evidence from neuropsychological patients implies that we cannot rely on introspection to tell us which of these circuits we are drawing on in any given instance of thought or reasoning. The diversity of individual representation formats suggested by cognitive neuroscience raises new and interesting questions for semantic theory about what we should take to be the internal world-model in which sentences are interpreted\, and can inspire new ideas about how human language was shaped by its interface with these pre-existing representational formats.\n\nLocation: Haines Hall 220
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/ellen-lau/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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