Congratulations: LSA stipends

Congratulations to Dave Kleinschmidt and Masha Fedzechkina for being awarded LSA stipends to attend the Linguistics Society of America’s 2011 Summer Institute at UC Boulder!

Word order and case marking in language acquisition and processing (LSA poster and CogSci paper)

We presented the results of our artificial language learning study on the use of case-marking and word order as cues in processing and learning at the LSA annual meeting. This is work done with Florian Jaeger and Elissa Newport. We investigated whether functional pressures (e.g., ambiguity reduction) operate during language acquisition, biasing learners to (subtly) deviate from the input they receive. Our results suggest that language learners indeed have a bias to reduce uncertainty (or ambiguity) in the input language: The learners are more likely to fix the word order if a language does not have case. See the image below for the details of the study or download the poster as a pdf here. Feedback welcome!

Update 11/29/11: This work was published in the 2011 CogSci Proceedings as

• Fedzechkina, M., Jaeger, T. F., and Newport, E. L. 2011. Functional Biases in Language Learning: Evidence from Word Order and Case-Marking Interaction. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci11), 318-323.

HLP Lab at the LSA and congratulations to Judith Degen and Masha Fedzechkina

Congratulations to Judith Degen and Masha Fedzechkina for having their two abstracts be among only twelve selected to be “media-worthy” by LSA reviewers:

• Degen, J. and Jaeger, T. F. 2011.  Speakers sacrifice some (of the) precision in conveyed meaning to accommodate robust communication. Talk to be presented at the 2011 Meeting of the LSA.
  • Session: Pragmatics II  31
  • Room: Le Batea
  • Time: Friday 2pm

The process of encoding an intended meaning into a linguistic utterance is well-known to be affected by production pressures. We present corpus data suggesting that the choice between even two seemingly non-meaning-equivalent forms as in (1a) and (1b) can be affected by speakers’ preference to distribute information uniformly across the linguistic signal (Uniform Information Density (UID), Jaeger 2006). This suggests that even when two forms do not encode the same (but a similar enough) message, speakers may sacrifice precision in meaning for increased processing efficiency.

(1a) Alex ate some chard.
(1b) Alex ate some of the chard

• Fedzechkina, M., Jaeger. T. F. , and Newport, E. 2011. Word order and case marking in language acquisition and processing. Poster to be presented at the 2011 Meeting of the LSA.
  • Session: Language Acquisition/Psycholinguistics/Syntax
  • Room: Grand Ballroom Foyer
  • Time: 9:00 – 10:30 AM.

To understand a sentence, comprehenders must identify its actor and patient. In principle, these relationships can be signaled using a single cue, but most languages employ several redundant cues, including word order and case marking. In artificial language learning experiments we investigate word order and case as cues in processing and learning. In languages without case marking, learners regularize word order; but when case marking is present, it is favored and limits word order regularization. Case-marking comes with a disadvantage: it is more complex to acquire. But the present results suggest that this may be outweighed by clarity for processing.

Special session at the LSA meeting in da’Burgh

You are ever so cordially invited to attend the following awesome-to-be workshop at the LSA 2011:

Empirically Examining Parsimony and Redundancy

in Usage-Based Models

Organized Session at 2011 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting

Schedule

Please see http://www.lsadc.org/info/preliminary-program-2011.cfm#saturday-afternoon (#50)

Main Session:
When: Saturday, 1/08, 2-3:30pm (1.5 jam-packed hours of mindless fun)
Where: Grand Ballroom 4, Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA

Poster Session
When: Sunday, 1/09, 9-12am (the journey continues)
Where: Grand Ballroom Foyer, Wyndham Grand Pittsburgh Downtown Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA

Participants

R. Harald Baayen (University of Alberta)
Joan Bresnan (Stanford University)
Walter Daelemans (University of Antwerp)
Bruce Derwing (University of Alberta)
Daniel Gildea (University of Rochester)
Matthew Goldrick (Northwestern University)
Peter Hendrix (University of Alberta)
Gerard Kempen (Max Planck Institute)
Victor Kuperman (McMaster University)
Yongeun Lee (Chung Ang University)
Gary Libben (University of Calgary)
Marco Marelli (University of Alberta)
Petar Milin (University of Alberta)
Timothy John O’Donnell (Harvard University)
Gabriel Recchia (Indiana University)
Antoine Tremblay (IWK Health Center)
Benjamin V. Tucker (University of Alberta)
Antal van den Bosch (Tilburg University/University of Antwerp)
Christ Westbury (University of Alberta)

Organizers

Neal Snider (Nuance Communications, Inc.)
Daniel Wiechmann (Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena)
Elma Kerz (RWTH-Universität Aachen)
T. Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester)

Description

Recent years have seen a growing interest in usage-based (UB) theories of language, which assume that language use plays a causal role in the development of linguistic systems over historical time. A central assumption of the UB-framework is the idea that shapes of grammars are closely connected to principles of human cognitive processing (Bybee 2006, Givon 1991, Hawkins 2004). UB-accounts strongly gravitate towards sign- or construction-based theories of language, viz. theories that are committed to the belief that linguistic knowledge is best conceived of as an assembly of symbolic structures (e.g. Goldberg 2006, Langacker 2008, Sag et al. 2003). These constructionist accounts share (1) the postulation of a single representational format of all linguistic knowledge and (2) claim a strong commitment to psychological plausibility of mechanisms for the learning, storage, and retrieval of linguistic units. They do, however, exhibit a considerable degree of variation with respect to their architectural and mechanistic details (cf. Croft & Cruse 2004).

LSA 2011 at Boulder: Yeah!

Woohooo. Roger Levy and I will be teaching a class on Computational Psycholinguistics at the 2011 LSA’s Linguistics Institute to be held July 5th- August 5th next year in Boulder, CO. The class description should be available through their website soon, but here are some snippets from our proposal:

In eigener Sache: LSA 2009 meeting

Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first day of the LSA meeting this year, but it was good being there (ran into lots of interesting folks and saw a couple of good talks). Ting gave his presentation on Constant Entropy Rate in Mandarin Chinese and he was a real pro .