Longobardi I

• Pino Longobardi (University of York)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Johnson I

• Scott Johnson (UCLA)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Longobardi II

• Pino Longobardi (University of York)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Gaskell I

• Gareth Gaskell (University of York)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Johnson II

• Scott Johnson (UCLA)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Friedmann I

• Na'ama Friedmann (Tel Aviv University)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Gaskell II

• Gareth Gaskell (University of York)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Information Theory and Language Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Friedmann II

• Na'ama Friedmann (Tel Aviv University)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Cristia I

• Alex Cristia (CNRS and Ecole Normale Superieure)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Cristia II

• Alex Cristia (CNRS and Ecole Normale Superieure)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Rule Extraction and Generalisation in Language Learning (Teacher)

• Kathy Rastle (Royal Holloway University of London)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor) 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 understanding of their functionality, in such a way as to use them to create new words (e.g. tweeter; someone who tweets). In this talk, I will describe work that my group has conducted using artificial word learning paradigms, in which we have discovered some key constraints on this discovery process. I then relate the principles that have emerged in these laboratory studies to what is known about children's acquisition of morphological knowledge.

Mapping Visual Symbols onto Spoken Language Forms

• Kathy Rastle (Royal Holloway University of London)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor) 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 work has allowed us to discover how the brain captures different forms of systematicity within the writing system, how the nature of the writing system impacts on emerging representations, and how the acquisition of literacy impacts on spoken language representations. I conclude by relating this work back to discoveries using more naturalistic methods, and argue that these two forms of evidence can be highly complementary in the study of reading acquisition.

Rolls I

• Edmund Rolls (University of Oxford)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

From memory processes to lexical self-organisation: a biologically-motivated integrative view of the morphological lexicon

• Vito Pirrelli (CNR, Pisa)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor) 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.

Word co-activation and competition and the perception of morphological structure

• Vito Pirrelli (CNR, Pisa)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor) 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 word recognition (Luce 1986; Luce & Pisoni 1998). Beyond specific differences depending on the nature of the input stimuli (e.g. acoustic vs. visual) and the processing requirements of the task (e.g. word recognition vs. word production), an interesting general pattern of reversal emerges: neighbours have facilitative effects on spoken word production and inhibitory effects in spoken word recognition. Furthermore, the frequency distribution of neighbours plays an important role in determining whether competition/co-activation effects are facilitative or inhibitory: high-frequency neighbours tend to exert an inhibitory effect on some processing tasks, while low-frequency neighbours facilitating execution of the same tasks. In the talk, we consider what competition-co-activation effects in lexical processing can tell us about the emergence of structure in morphologically complex words, based on evidence from highly inflected languages (Marzi et al. 2016) and English word compounding (Gagné & Spalding (in press); Ferro et al. 2016). References Ferro, Marcello; Marzi, Claudia; Pirrelli, Vito; Gagné, Christina & Spadling, Thomas 2016. One word or two? Discriminative effects of word entrenchment and competition on processing compounds and pseudo-compounds. 17 International Morphology Meeting, 18-21 February 2016, Vienna. Gagné, C.L. & Spalding, T.L. (in press). Effects of morphology and semantic transparency on typing latencies in English compound and pseudo-compound words. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. Gathercole, Susan E.; Hitch, Graham J.; Service, Elisabet S. & Martin, Amanda J. 1997. Phonological short term memory and new word learning in children. Developmental Psychology 33. 966-979. Luce, Paul A. 1986. A computational analysis of uniqueness points in auditory word recognition. Perception and Psychophysics 39. 155–158. Luce, Paul A. & Pisoni, David B. 1998. Recognizing spoken words: The neighborhood activation model. Ear and hearing 19 (1). 1-36. Marzi, Claudia; Ferro, Marcello; Cardillo, Franco Alberto & Pirrelli Vito 2016. Effects of frequency and regularity in an integrative model of word storage and processing. In Marzi C. and Pirrelli V. (eds.), Italian Journal of Linguistics 28(1). Pitt, Mark A. & McQueen, James M. 1998. Is compensation for coarticulation mediated by the lexicon? Journal of Memory and Language 39(3). 347-370. Vitevitch, Michael S. & Luce, Paul A. 1998. When words compete: Levels of processing in spoken word recognition. Psychological Science 9. 325–329. Vitevitch, Michael S.; Luce, Paul A.; Charles-Luce, Jan & Kemmerer, David 1997. Phonotactics and syllable stress: Implications for the processing of spoken nonsense words. Language and Speech 40. 47–62.

Rolls II

• Edmund Rolls (University of Oxford)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Davis and Adelman I

• James Adelman (University of Warwick)
• Colin Davis (University of Bristol)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Davis and Adelman II

• Colin J. Davis (University of Bristol)
• James Adelman (University of Warwick)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

The blind cognitive scientists and an elephant: Language statistics and perceptual simulation in conceptual processing

• Max Louwerse (Tilburg University)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor) 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 unified account of cognition. For many findings in the embodied cognition literature attributed to perceptual simulation, language statistics are in fact better predictors, depending on the cognitive task, the nature of the stimulus, individual differences and the time course of processing.

Davis and Adelman III

• Colin Davis (University of Bristol)
• James Adelman (University of Warwick)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Special Event 2: Tim Shallice

• Tim Shallice (SISSA, Trieste, Italy)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Special Event 3: Chris Mathys

• Chris Mathys (UCL and University of Zurich)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)

Language encodes perceptual information: Evidence from distributional semantics

• Max Louwerse (Tilburg University)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor) 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 latitude of cities. Moreover, experimental evidence shows that language users rely on these language statistical patterns in their cognitive processes.

Special Event 4: Yann LeCun

• Yann LeCun (New York University and Facebook)

Room: Meeting room (7th floor)