Speaker
Dr
Vito Pirrelli
(CNR, Pisa)
Description
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 evidence on word paradigms has met recent developments in Computational Linguistics and Neurolinguistics. Self-organising artificial neural networks (Kohonen 2001; Pirrelli et al. 2015, Marzi & Pirrelli 2015) have offered an algorithmic account of the hypothesis that the mental lexicon is a highly-redundant, dynamic store of full words, which get co-activated and compete for selection during lexical processing. At the same time, recent advances in understanding the neuro-anatomical areas supporting memory (Wilson 2001; D’Esposito 2007; Ma et al. 2014) have showed that working memory consists in the transient activation of long-term memory structures, controlled and maintained by the integration of auditory-motor circuits in the perisylvian network (Catani et al. 2005; Shalom & Poeppel 2008). All these developments converge on the idea that stored lexical representations are in fact the long-term by-product of their processing history. In the talk, we illustrate simulative evidence supporting these insights and explore their theoretical implications for models of the mental lexicon.
References
Ackerman, Farrell; Blevins, James & Malouf, Robert 2009. Parts and wholes: implicative patterns in inflectional paradigms. In Blevins, James P. & Blevins, Juliette (eds.), Analogy in Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 54-82.
Catani, Marco; Jones, Derek K. & ffytche, Dominic H. 2005. Perisylvian language networks of the human brain. Annals of Neurology 57. 8-16.
D’Esposito, Mark 2007. From cognitive to neural models of working memory. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Biological Sciences 362. 761-772.
Finkel, Raphael & Stump, Gregory. 2007. Principal parts and morphological typology. Morphology 17. 39-75.
Kohonen, Teuvo 2001. Self-organizing maps. Berlin Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag.
Ma, Wei J.; Husain, Masud & Bays, Paul M. 2014. Changing concepts of working memory. Nature neuroscience 17(3). 347-356.
Marzi, Claudia & Pirrelli, Vito 2015. A Neuro-Computational Approach to Understanding the Mental Lexicon. Journal of Cognitive Science 16 (4). 491-533.
Pirrelli, Vito; Ferro, Marcello & Marzi, Claudia 2015. Computational complexity of abstractive morphology. In Baerman, Matthew; Brown, Dustan % Corbett, Greville (eds.). Understanding and Measuring Morphological Complexity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 141-166.
Pirrelli, Vito & Battista, Marco 2000. The paradigmatic dimension of stem allomorphy in Italian verb inflection. Italian Journal of Linguistics 12. 307-379. Matthews, Peter H. 1991. Morphology (second edition). Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press.
Shalom, Dorit B. & Poeppel, David 2008. Functional Anatomic Models of Language: Assembling the Pieces. The Neuroscientist 14. 119-127.
Wilson, Margaret. 2001. The case of sensorimotor coding in working memory. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 8(1). 44-57.
