Overview
The Workshop on Language and Cognition is an interdisciplinary forum for students and faculty whose work concerns the relation between language and thought, with a particular emphasis on the cognitive bases of language learning.
Topics of discussion will include:
- What general learning principles are found in humans independently of language that may be of relevance to language learning?
- What is the role of statistical learning in the acquisition of language?
- Does learning a particular language affect the way one thinks? Or is there a cognitive bedrock that is unaffected by language?
- What leads, over generations of transmission through learning, to universal tendencies in language structure?
Interested graduate students of any department are especially invited to participate. If you have research you would like to present in the course of the workshop, please contact Max Bane (bane at uchicago dot edu) to set things up.
Announcements
- Jan 21, 2008 - We are very pleased to announce that our speaker this week (Friday, Jan. 25th) will be Charles Yang, from the University of Pennsylvania.
Confirmed Non-local Invited Speakers
See below for the scheduled dates of their talks.
- Tom Griffiths (Berkeley)
- Mark Johnson (Brown)
- Simon Kirby (U. Edinburgh)
- Charles Yang (U. Pennsylvania)
Schedule
The workshop convenes on Fridays, twice per month according the following schedule, in Green Hall, Room 104 at 4:00pm. Persons with a disability who believe they may need assistance, please call or email Max Bane in advance at 920-850-2646 or bane at uchicago dot edu.
Fall Quarter, 2007
| October 5, 2007 | Speaker: Partha Niyogi (U. Chicago). The computational nature of language learning and evolution. |
| October 26, 2007 | Speaker: Max Bane (U. Chicago). Multilingual Learning as Parameter Co-occurrence Clustering. |
| November 9, 2007 | Speaker: Susan Goldin-Meadow (U. Chicago). Gesture's Role in Creating and Learning Language |
| November 30, 2007 | Speaker: Terry Regier (U. Chicago). Whorf was half right: Linguistic relativity re-examined. 4:00pm |
Winter Quarter, 2008
| January 18, 2008 | Speaker: Morgan Sonderegger (U. Chicago). When does variation lead to change? A dynamical systems model of a stress shift in English. |
| January 25, 2008 | Speaker: Charles Yang (Penn) |
| February 15, 2008 | Speaker: Alan Yu. Selective pressure in sound change and its implications for phonological typology. |
| February 29, 2008 | Cancelled |
Spring Quarter, 2008
| April 18, 2008 | Speaker: Aren Jansen (U. Chicago): Point Process Models for Automatic Speech Recognition |
| April 25, 2008 | Speaker: Simon Kirby (Edinburgh): What cultural evolution tells us about the innateness of language |
| May 2, 2008 | Speaker: Tom Griffiths (Berkeley) |
| May 9, 2008 | Speaker: Mark Johnson (Brown) |
| May 30, 2008 | Speaker: James Kirby (U. Chicago) |
| June 6, 2008 | Speaker: Dea Hunsicker (U. Chicago) |
Contacts
| Max Bane, Student Coordinator | bane at uchicago dot edu | maxbane.com |
| Terry Regier, Faculty Sponsor | regier at uchicago dot edu | www.psych.uchicago.edu/~regier |
| Jason Riggle, Faculty Sponsor | jriggle at uchicago dot edu | hum.uchicago.edu/~jriggle |
