language learning
Congratulations to Dr. Fedzechkina
Congratulations to Masha (a.k.a Dr. Fedzechkina) for successfully defending her thesis “Communicative Efficiency, Language Learning, and Language Universals“, jointly advised by Lissa Newport (now at Georgetown) and me. Masha’s thesis presents 7 multi-day artificial language learning studies that investigate the extent to which functional pressures guide language learning, thereby leading learners to subtly deviate from the input they receive.
Five of the experiments investigate the trade-off between word order and case-marking as a means of encoding grammatical function assignment. For a preview on these experiments, see the short report in Fedzechkina, Jaeger, and Newport (2011) and this paper under review. Two additional experiments investigate how learners trade-off animacy and case-marking (Fedzechkina, Jaeger, & Newport, 2012). Her most recent studies also show how learners trade-off uncertainty (assessed as the conditional entropy over grammatical function assignments given perfect knowledge of the grammar) and effort.
Your thoughts on second, third, etc. language learning
After a recent discussion in the lab, I’m curious to hear your speculative or informed opinions about the factors that determine someone’s proficiency in a second (or third, …) language. I’ve put together a brief survey (5-10 minutes) and if you have some time, it’d be great to hear your thoughts. Experts’ and non-experts’ opinions are equally welcome. I will post the results of the survey here.
Thank you for your participation.
HLP/Jaeger lab blog 