- 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
'Second-Order Learning' as a Source of Structure Stabilization in Both Individual Learning and Cultural Evolution
Colin Dawson
The last decade-plus of research on infant language development has revealed a number of powerful statistical learning mechanisms that may help to solve some key problems for learners of language. However, in order for a cognitively realistic learner to arrive at appropriate generalizations in the face of an infinite number of regularities in the input, constraints on learning must be present. Several broad classes of constraint have been proposed, ranging from those instantiated in hardware (e.g. the sensitivity of perceptual systems to a restricted set of inputs) to rich built-in knowledge about the properties of the environment (e.g. Universal Grammar). One potential source of constraints might be a cyclical bootstrapping process whereby learners preferentially consider generalizations that depend on features and relationships that have proved reliable in their past experience. I present data from rule-learning studies with infants that suggests that past reliability of certain features predicts, for more experienced learners, whether a generalization over those features will be easy to learn. If this is true for human-produced environments such as language and music, it would constitute a positive feedback loop over structural regularity that would have implications not only for individual learning, but for the evolution of the domain over generations.