- 1:00 Welcome by Mike Hammond
- Introductory remarks by Andy Wedel
Friday, April 25, 2008: Harvill rm. 115
- 1:15 - 2:15 Harry Tily
- Diachronic processing preferences and their implications for models of syntactic change
- 2:15 – 3:15 Neal Snider
- An exemplar model of syntactic production
Tea Break
- 3:30 – 4:30 Joan Bresnan
- Predicting Syntax: Processing Dative Constructions in Two Varieties of English
- 4:30 – 5:30 Discussion
Dinner at Poca Cosa
- 8:30 Coffee
Saturday, April 26, 2008: Harvill rm. 102
- 8:45 – 9:45 Rob Malouf, Farrell Ackerman and Jim Blevins
- Inflectional morphology as a complex adaptive system
- 9:45 – 10:45 Melissa Redford
- Meaning and Mechanics in Speech and Language Acquisition
Tea Break
- 11:00 – 12:00 Eduardo Altmann
- Recurrences in processes with long-term memory
Lunch
- 1:30—2:30 Robert Daland
- Language variation: convergence, divergence and death
- 2:30 – 3:30 Colin Dawson
- 'Second-Order Learning' as a Source of Structure Stabilization in Both Individual Learning and Cultural Evolution
Tea Break
- 3:45 – 4:45 Andy Wedel
- Modeling sublexical contrast maintenance as an emergent effect of lexical category competition
- 4:45 – 5:45 Clay Beckner and Andy Wedel
- Modeling contributions of usage versus acquisition to language change
Department Potluck party at 7 at Adam Ussishkin and Andy Wedel’s house
Meaning and Mechanics in Speech and Language Acquisition
Melissa Redford
The way in which a system develops informs the way in which it is ultimately structured, represented, and implemented. I will describe several studies on different aspects of speech and language acquisition that are based on this principle. The specific goal will be to show how sound structure representations are shaped by the interaction between meaning and mechanics during development. Meaning is broadly construed in terms of communicative goals, including the basic need to be understood by a listener, and mechanics is construed in terms of motor constraints on planning and executing speech.
- Redford, M.A. (in press). Production constraints on learning novel onset phonotactics. Cognition (2008), doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2007.11.014;
- Redford, M.A., Miikkulainen, R. (2007). Rate effects on structure in a source-filter model of phonological development. Language, 83(4), 737-69;
- Redford, M.A., Gildersleeve-Neumann, C. (2007). The acquisition of two phonetic cues to word boundaries. Journal of Child Language, 34(4), 815-43.