Prof.
Kathy Rastle
(Royal Holloway University of London)
7/11/16, 11:00 AM
Teacher
Much of language learning consists of discovering regularities across multiple exemplars, which can be used to interpret or produce new linguistic items. Morphology presents an important example of this discovery process. Though we are rarely exposed to prefixes and suffixes in isolation, our repeated exposure to them in different words (e.g. banker, runner, teacher) allows us to develop an...
Prof.
Kathy Rastle
(Royal Holloway University of London)
7/12/16, 9:00 AM
Learning to read is arguably the most important challenge for the child starting school. Mapping new visual symbols onto existing spoken and conceptual forms also presents an interesting challenge for the brain. In this talk, I discuss some of the work that my laboratory has been conducting using artificial language learning approaches to understand how the brain solves this challenge. This...
Dr
Vito Pirrelli
(CNR, Pisa)
7/12/16, 2:30 PM
According to “Words and Paradigm” approaches to morphological competence (Blevins 2006 among others), mastering the inflectional system of a language amounts to acquiring an increasing number of constraints on how paradigm are filled in by full word forms (see Ackerman et al. 2009; Finkel & Stump 2007; Pirrelli & Battista 2000; Matthews 1991; among others). Linguistic and developmental...
Dr
Vito Pirrelli
(CNR, Pisa)
7/13/16, 9:00 AM
The cognitive literature on similarity-based principles of word association has greatly contributed to understanding effects of family size and frequency of neighbouring words on a variety of word processing tasks: non-word repetition (Vitevitch et al. 1997; Vitevitch & Luce 1998), recall from verbal short-term memory (Gathercole et al. 1997), phoneme identification (Pitt & McQueen 1998) and...
Prof.
Colin Davis
(University of Bristol), Dr
James Adelman
(University of Warwick)
7/13/16, 3:30 PM
Prof.
Colin J. Davis
(University of Bristol), Dr
James Adelman
(University of Warwick)
7/13/16, 5:30 PM
Prof.
Max Louwerse
(Tilburg University)
7/14/16, 9:00 AM
Over the last decade the cognitive sciences have strongly advocated an embodied view on cognition. Despite the empirical evidence favoring perceptual simulation in language processing, the conclusions drawn from this evidence often suggest perceptual simulation being the only explanation for conceptual processing. This talk demonstrates that language statistics should not be dismissed in a...
Prof.
Colin Davis
(University of Bristol), Dr
James Adelman
(University of Warwick)
7/14/16, 11:00 AM
Prof.
Max Louwerse
(Tilburg University)
7/15/16, 9:00 AM
There is an increasing amount of evidence that language encodes perceptual information. In fact, distributional semantics allow for extracting perceptual relations can be extracted. This talk will give examples of language encoding perceptual information, showing that taking rather simple co-occurrence techniques allow for predicting social networks, valence, iconicity and even longitude and...
Prof.
Yann LeCun
(New York University and Facebook)
7/15/16, 11:00 AM
Mr
Axel Barrault
(Ecole Normale Superieure - PSL Research University (ENS-EHESS-CNRS))
Negation is a universal linguistic concept presenting an interesting question in language acquisition research. Researchers have long noted that children start producing the word ‘no’ in their own speech at about one year of age (e.g., Bloom, 1970; Pea, 1980). Surprisingly, many studies investigating the online processing of negative sentences suggest that children younger than 2 years are not...
Mr
Jesus Calvillo
(Saarland University)
Student
A defining characteristic of human language is systematicity:
“the ability to produce/understand some sentences is
intrinsically connected to the ability to produce/understand
certain others” (Fodor & Pylyshyn, 1988). Further, Fodor
and Pylyshyn (1988) argue that connectionist models are not
able to display systematicity without implementing a classical
symbol system.
The...
Ms
Konstantina Kordouli
(University of Patras)
The present study investigates the lexical access of exocentric compounds in Modern Greek (MG), through a lexical decision task with overt priming. There are three types of compounds in MG depending on the semantic relations holding between their constituents and the position of the head (Ralli, 2013): A) *Dependent compounds* are head-final structures with a dependency relation between their...
Prof.
Daniela Traficante
(Department of Psychology - Catholic University of Milan)
Several studies (see Rayner, 2009) focused on the variables that influence eye-movements in reading morphologically complex words. Yan et al. (2014) provided evidence for the role of the morphological structure of words on eye-movements in reading suffixed words. However, Häikiö et al. (2011) suggested that the use of morphemic structure can be influenced by reading skills, as slow 2nd grade...
Dr
Vito Pirrelli
(Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa CNR)
Teacher
According to “Words and Paradigm” approaches to morphological competence (Blevins 2006 among others), mastering the inflectional system of a language amounts to acquiring an increasing number of constraints on how paradigm are filled in by full word forms (see Ackerman et al. 2009; Finkel & Stump 2007; Pirrelli & Battista 2000; Matthews 1991; among others). Linguistic and developmental...
14.
How does the provision of semantic information influence the lexicalization of new spoken words?
Dr
Erin Hawkins
(MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge, U.K.)
An important aspect of acquiring new words is their integration with existing vocabulary knowledge. The integration of a new word with existing lexical items does not occur immediately after learning, but often requires a period of offline memory consolidation. Whilst the integration of a new spoken word can occur within twenty-four hours of learning its phonological form, previous studies...
Prof.
Kathy Rastle
(Royal Holloway University of London)
Learning to read is arguably the most important challenge for the child starting school. Mapping new visual symbols onto existing spoken and conceptual forms also presents an interesting challenge for the brain. In this talk, I discuss some of the work that my laboratory has been conducting using artificial language learning approaches to understand how the brain solves this challenge. This...
Ms
Karla Orihuela
(Université de Toulouse)
Student
Recently, Beyersmann, Ziegler & Grainger (2015) tested affix chunking in a letter search experiment. They found an advantage for suffixed nonwords (e.g., *filmure*) over pseudo-suffixed (e.g., *filmire*) but not for prefixed nonwords (i.e., *propoint* is not > than *cropoint*). This asymmetry was interpreted as a reflection of different underlying processes for the recognition of suffixed and...
Mr
Hector Yamil Vidal Dos Santos
(SISSA)
Student
Prediction occupies a role in a wide range of cognitive functions. It is known that prediction can be implemented at different levels (i.e. conscious or automatic). When subjects have explicit (i.e. conscious) expectations about incoming stimuli, the presentation of deviants elicits ERP responses with shorter latencies and higher amplitudes.
In the case of speech perception, evidence shows...
Prof.
Kathy Rastle
(Royal Holloway University of London)
Much of language learning consists of discovering regularities across multiple exemplars, which can be used to interpret or produce new linguistic items. Morphology presents an important example of this discovery process. Though we are rarely exposed to prefixes and suffixes in isolation, our repeated exposure to them in different words (e.g. banker, runner, teacher) allows us to develop an...
Dr
Roberta Bettoni
(University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy)
Rule Learning (RL) is an implicit learning mechanism that allows to extract and generalize abstract rules from a sequence of elements without intention to learn. This capacity to learn complex regularities is thought to be a prerequisite for learning of language rules and for social intuition and adaptation to one’s social environment. Despite the relevance of RL for linguistic and social...
Dr
Francesco Olivucci
(University of Bologna)
Previous studies have investigated the developing of stress accent in young children learning English, showing that the period between two and three years of age is crucial to learn how to modulate duration, intensity and pitch parameters in order to produce the differences between stressed and unstressed syllables (Pollock et al., 1993, Kehoe et al., 1995; Schwartz et al., 1996). The studies...
Mr
Alex de Carvalho
(Ecole Normale Superieuere - PSL Research University (ENS-EHESS-CNRS))
Having access to the syntactic structure of sentences can help children to discover the meaning of novel words (Gleitman, 1990). We exploited phrasal prosody to construct minimal pairs of sentences in French, to test how children’s prosodic-syntactic processing skills impact their learning. A first study used sentences like ‘*Regarde la petite bamoule*’, which can be produced either as...
Mr
Yair Lakretz
(Tel-Aviv university)
Student
Theories of phoneme representation have been based on the notion of 'subphonemic features', i.e. variables such as place of articulation, voicing and nasalization, some binary and some multi-valued, that can be taken to characterize the production, and with some modifications also the perception, of different phonemes. However, perceptual confusion rates between phonemes cannot be simply...
Dr
Chiara Zanini
(Università degli Studi di Padova), Dr
Francesca Franzon
(Università degli Studi di Padova), Dr
Silvia Benavides-Varela
(Università degli Studi di Padova)
Literature suggests a bias for countability in language acquisition: children likely assume a new word to refer to a whole-object, not to the substance of the object (Bloom & Kelemen, 1995; Markman, 1990) and prefer the count morpho-syntax over the mass morpho-syntax (Barner & Snedeker, 2005; Gathercole, 1985).
Why is count interpretation favored? Is this bias due to a linguistic...
Dr
Vito Pirrelli
(Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale, Pisa CNR)
Teacher
The cognitive literature on similarity-based principles of word association has greatly contributed to understanding effects of family size and frequency of neighbouring words on a variety of word processing tasks: non-word repetition (Vitevitch et al. 1997; Vitevitch & Luce 1998), recall from verbal short-term memory (Gathercole et al. 1997), phoneme identification (Pitt & McQueen 1998) and...
