Upcoming Events
On Thursday, 30th May 2019, the Cambridge Linguistics Forum (CLF) has the pleasure to host Prof Anita Mehta (University of Oxford), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Language dynamics - what we hear and how we hear it'. Time - Thursday 30th May, 4.30-6pm (There will be a coffee reception on the ground floor from 4pm.) Venue - English Faculty Building, SR-24 (second floor) Abstract Language dynamics - what we hear and how we hear it Speech perception and the evolution of languages have a long and rich history in the domain of linguistics research. I will, in this talk, present a physicist's take on aspects of each of these two topics. In the first part, I'll describe a minimal model of the way in which a listener deciphers a string of sounds and tries to reconstruct a word, both with and without mishearings. This will lead to a phase diagram with a separation between regions of easy and hard decipherability. In the second part of the talk, I'll describe a model of the evolution of participles, and show that the inclusion of true dynamical competition does better than Ringe and Yang's threshold principle (2016) in explaining the survival of particular forms. The last part of this talk concerns the data analysis of a study of audiovisual cognition in a mixed-literacy population, where the use of fluctuations, rather than averages, is able to produce good data collapse from initially rather noisy data.
Past Events
18 January
Freek Van de Velde (University of Leuven)
Faculty sponsor: Dr David Willis
Research area: Mechanisms of Language Change
Title: Languages adapt to minute differences in their speakers’ ecology
Venue (time): GR-06/7 (4-5:30pm)
1 February
Harald Baayen (University of Tübingen)
Faculty sponsor: Dr Jim Blevins
Research area: Computational Linguistics
Title: Using quantile regression and dynamic survival analysis to study the time course of the lexical processing of complex words
Venue (time): GR-06/7 (4-5:30pm)
15 February
Roberto Sileo
Faculty sponsor: Prof Kasia Jaszczolt
Research area: Semantics, Pragmatics & Philosophy
Title: The Semantics and Pragmatics of racial and ethnic language: towards a comprehensive radical contextual account
Venue (time): GR-06/7 (4-5:30pm)
1 March
Teresa Bajo (University of Granada)
Faculty sponsor: Prof Ianthi Tsimpli
Research area: Language Acquisition & Language Processing
Title: Sources of Variability in Language Activation and Control in Spanish/English bilinguals and L2 learners
Venue (time): GR-06/7 (4-5:30pm)
26 March
Jim McCloskey (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Faculty sponsor: Prof Ian Roberts
Research area: Comparative Syntax
Title: Understanding Ellipsis: Corpus, Annotation, Theory
Venue (time): GR-06/07 (4-5:30pm)
26 April
Prof Richard 'Dick' Hudson (Retired, UCL Division of Psychology and Language Sciences)
Faculty sponsor: Dr N Katsos, Dr B Post, Prof I Roberts
Research area: Relevant to all of TAL
Title: Linguistics and education: a case of mutual dependency?
Venue (time): GR-06/07 (4-5:30pm)
17 May - This talk has been POSTPONED to the next academic year.
Margaret Kehoe (University of Geneva)
Faculty sponsor: Dr Brechtje Post
Research area: Experimental Phonetics & Phonology
Title: Seeking cross-linguistic interaction in the phonetic and phonological development of bilingual French-speaking children
Venue (time): TBA
31 May
Devyani Sharma (Queen Mary University of London)
Faculty sponsor: Prof Ianthi Tsimpli
Research area: Language Acquisition & Language Processing
Title: Syntactic Change in Postcolonial Englishes: Substrates and Input
Venue (time): English Faculty Building, 2nd FL, Room 24; (4-5:30pm)
