Calendar of events

Term 2 will start with a seminar on Monday, January 14th at 16h, room H2.03. Morten H. Christiansen will be giving a talk entitled: "Language Evolution through the Bottleneck: From Milliseconds to Millennia ".

Abstract:

Over the past few decades, the language sciences have seen a shift toward explaining language evolution in terms of cultural evolution rather than biological adaptation. This work has demonstrated how various nonlinguistic biases amplified by cultural transmission across generations, along with pressures from interactions between individuals within each generation, may help explain many facets of linguistic structure observable in today’s languages. In this talk, I discuss the possible contribution to language evolution of a fundamental constraint on processing, the Now-or-Never bottleneck: during normal linguistic interaction, we are faced with an immense challenge by the combined effects of rapid input, short-lived sensory memory, and severely limited sequence memory. To overcome the Now-or-Never bottleneck, language users must learn to compress and recode language input as rapidly as possible into increasingly more abstract levels of linguistic representation. This perspective has profound implications for the nature of language processing, acquisition, and evolution. To illustrate, I present results from a lab-based cultural evolution experiment and psycholinguistic experimentation. Together, these studies suggest that cultural evolution, as constrained by basic chunk-based learning and processing mechanisms, has promoted the emergence of structure in language that helps alleviate the challenge posed by the Now-or-Never bottleneck.

For the remaining available time slots (in green) in Term 3, I would like to invite first year PhD students to present their research projects. Please email me or Kita if you would like to present.

Contact: Marion Coumel