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Center for Cognitive Science The Puzzle of the Mind |
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| Spring
2006 Colloquia
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| January 25 Business Meeting February March April |
Regular colloquia are Wednesdays, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, at 280 Park Hall, North Campus and are open to the public. Refreshments are served. (Calender of Events: Spring 2006) For related CogSci events please go to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Philosophy. If you are interested in receiving email announcements of each event, please subscribe to one of our email mailing lists. Calendar of Events
Abstracts
Wednesday,
January 26, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Business Meeting
Wednesday,
February 1, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Craig
Chambers, Ph.D. "Referential
anticipation in Studies of spoken language comprehension have shown that listeners often anticipate upcoming referents as sentences unfold. For example, predicate terms such as "eat?" or "inside..." are used to rapidly narrow the domain of referential candidates to edible things/containers in the contextual environment. To a large degree, these outcomes can be accounted for by embodied theories of language understanding, e.g., where linguistic meaning is grounded in mental simulations of perception and action. In this talk, I will present a series of studies that evaluate whether anticipatory processes can be explained without appealing to aspects of linguistic or conceptual knowledge that are not naturally captured in embodied approaches. The outcomes reveal that this knowledge strongly constrains the use of perceptual and action-based information in referential predictions, even with predicate terms that denote concrete and perceptible physical events. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 8, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Jeri
Jaeger , Ph.D. "Putting
the 'psycho' in For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 15, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Ann
Pier Salverda, Ph.D. "Eye movements reveal sensitivity to prosodically conditioned detail in spoken-word recognition" In
the first part of my talk, I will discuss data from a number of
eye-tracking experiments that examined the role of fine-grained
prosodically-conditioned detail in the recognition of spoken words.
In these experiments, participants followed spoken instructions
to manipulate objects in a visual display. Eye movements to the
objects provide a sensitive measure of the dynamics of the lexical
competition process as speech unfolds, showing that prosodically
conditioned detail has systematic effects on the lexical competition
process. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 22, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Student Presentations (1)
For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
March 1, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Student Presentations (2)
For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
March 8, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Douglas
Roland , Ph.D. Frequency
of Basic English Grammatical Structures: Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been given to the appropriateness of using any particular set of corpus frequencies in modeling human language. We provide a comprehensive set of structural frequencies for a variety of written and spoken corpora, focusing on structures that have played a critical role in debates on normal psycholinguistics, aphasia, and child language acquisition, and compare our results with those from several recent papers to illustrate the implications and limitations of using corpus data in psycholinguistic research.
For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
March 29, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Barbara
Landau, Ph.D. "Starting
at the end: The importance of goals A
hallmark of human cognition is our capacity to talk about what we
see. How is this accomplished? Given that language and spatial representations
are likely to have quite different kinds of structures, the challenge
is to understand how such apparently different systems of knowledge
map onto each other, and how these mappings are learned. In my talk,
I will discuss this problem with respect to the language of events,
including manner of motion, change of possession, attachment/ detachment,
and change of state events. I will focus on evidence from normally
developing children and children with Williams’ syndrome a
rare genetic deficit that gives rise to an unusual cognitive profile
of profoundly impaired spatial representations together with spared
language. The evidence shows that a fundamental property of event
semantics an asymmetry between source and goal expressions is a
pervasive fact about the linguistic description of events. Ancillary
evidence suggests that this asymmetry is also a part of our non-linguistic
representations, appearing in non-linguistic tasks among infants,
children, and adults. As a whole, the results suggest a homology
between spatial language and spatial representation, thereby providing
a partial solution to the problem of mapping dissimilar domains
onto each other. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
April 5, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Josephine
Anstey ,
Ph.D. Interactive Fiction: Dreams and Realities Science Fiction ("The Velt", Neuromancer, the Holodeck) has promised us fully immersive interactive narrative for decades. In the 1980s and 90s, hype about artificial intelligence and virtual reality; the eagerly awaited marriage between video gaming and Hollywood; and hypertext, suggested the promise was about to be fulfilled. But killer interactive fiction has not emerged. Story been a driver/colonizer of literary forms (poetry, drama, the novel) and mass media (print, radio, film, TV), but is it failing to conquer the interactive and procedural realm of the computer? This talk looks at what an interactive story form could or should be. It explores the roles of the participant, the author, and the computer within such a form, and is informed by my art/literary practise which uses immersive virtual reality and intelligent agents to create dramatic experiences for a participant. For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
April 12, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus Fabian
Neuhaus, Ph.D. A Formal Theory of Family Resemblance One of Wittgenstein's
major insights is about the nature of meaning: According to him
it is often impossible to link the meanings of words to necessary
and sufficient conditions. His prime example is the word game: Soccer,
chess, table tennis, and Pac Man are very different. It seems to
be futile to look for (non-trivial) necessary and sufficient conditions
that allow us to categorize them as games. Hence, according to Wittgenstein,
we should reject any theory which ties meaning to strict conditions.
Meaning arises from the praxis of speakers, it is the result of
'language games'. For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
April 19, 2006 280 Park Hall, North Campus John
Ohala, Ph.D. "The phonetics-phonology interface ... again." In
1990 I argued against the notion that there is phonetics-phonology
interface (“There is no interface between phonetics and phonology:
a personal view” J. Phonetics 18.153-171). I return
to this argument and give added evidence that phonology can do its
best job of explaining sound patterns in language by incorporating
phonetics. Among the examples treated are: (a) There are asymmetries
in the direction of change and alternation between certain sounds,
e.g., palatalized velars and apicals and palatalized labials and
apicals. The explanation lies in the acoustics of these sounds and
their perception. (b) Vowel nasalization occasionally arises when
the conditioning environment is not a nasal, e.g., near [h] and
other voiceless fricatives. The explanation lies is the acoustic
effects these sounds have on adjacent vowels. (c) What have been
called “epenthetic” stops are found in a variety of
contexts, e.g., nasal C ___ fricative: warm[p]th, and lateral___fricative:
el[t]se. A somewhat rare instance involves the context labial nasal
___ apical nasal: Old English nemna ~ nempne “name. Physiological
phonetics can give a unified account of these cases. Phonology without
phonetics (and without sociological and psychological causal factors)
reduces to simple description no matter how much arcane formalism
is added to it. For a printable version of this file click here
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Last updated on Monday, April 10, 2006 7:32 AM by H. Jones
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