LINGUIST List 25.1394
Mon
Mar 24 2014
Confs: Language
Acquisition, Phonology, Psycholing/UK
Editor for this issue:
Xiyan Wang <xiyanlinguistlist.org>
Date: 22-Mar-2014
From: Oliver Bond
<o.bond
surrey.ac.uk>
Subject: Workshop on Learning
Biases in Natural and Artificial Language
Acquisition
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Workshop on Learning Biases in Natural and
Artificial Language Acquisition
Date: 05-Sep-2014 - 05-Sep-2014
Location: Oxford, United Kingdom
Contact: Oliver Bond
Contact Email:
< click here to access email >
Meeting URL:
http://www.lagb.org.uk/lagb2014/biases
Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition;
Phonology; Psycholinguistics
Meeting Description:
This workshop, organised by Adam Albright (MIT)
and Andrew Nevins (UCL), will be held in
conjunction with Adam Albright's Linguistics
Association Lecture on Friday 5th September at
the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Linguistics
Association of Great Britain in Oxford.
http://www.lagb.org.uk/lagb2014/biases
Background:
What expectations or biases do learners bring
to the task of learning phonological grammars?
Work on language typology, diachronic change,
and evaluation metrics for learning algorithms
has identified a number of factors that might
encourage learners to favor one hypothesis over
another. These include preferences based on
formal properties of the grammar, such as a
bias for featurally simpler or more general
processes, or a bias towards certain type of
interactions. They also include substantive
biases
for certain types of processes, such as a
preference for processes that target
phonetically difficult structures, or a bias
against processes that lead to perceptually
salient alternations, or even limitations that
make some processes completely unlearnable.
Until recently, the argument that learners
favor some patterns over others has largely
been based on indirect evidence: learning
biases can provide an account of how
grammatical preferences shape acquisition
errors, language change, and typology. The past
decade has seen a rapid rise of interest in
studying learning directly in the lab, both
among infants and adults. This work has studied
the time course of acquisition of natural
language (L1) patterns by children, as well as
the rate or readiness with which infants and
adults learn artificial grammars.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together
researchers employing a variety of techniques
to study this kind of phonological learning 'in
the lab'. The workshop aims to foster a
dialogue on questions such as: how can we
relate performance in an artificial lab task to
natural language acquisition? What kinds of
biases have actually been supported by
experimental results, to date? What kinds of
biases do these techniques allow us to test,
and what kinds of biases can only be observed
within the context of a
full-blown linguistic system with qualitatively
and quantitatively more complex training,
longer timescales of learning, and learning
within richer semantic contexts? What is the
contribution, if any, of participants' L1 to
the task of artificial grammar learning? We
hope that the invited talks and the posters,
selected from an open call for papers, will
shed light on these and other questions through
a range of theoretical and empirical
contributions.
Plenary Speaker:
Adam Albright (MIT) - 'Generalizing
phonological patterns with phonetic and
featural biases'
Invited Speakers:
Alex Cristia (CNRS) - 'Linguistically relevant
information in the implicit abstraction of
sound patterns from speech: Infant and adult
data'
Sara Finley (Elmhurst College) - 'Shedding
light on phonological representations through
adult learning experiments'
Elliott Moreton (University of North Carolina)
- 'Phonological concept learning: Experiments
and models'
Ruben van de Vijver (Potsdam) & Dinah
Baer-Henney (Potsdam) - 'Learners' little
helper'
Page Updated: 24-Mar-2014