Experimental Psychology Seminar - Prof. Kenny Smith

Abstract: Languages persist through a cycle of learning and use - we learn the language of our community through immersion in that language, then in using that language to meet our communicative goals we generate more linguistic data which others learn from. In previous work we have used computational and experimental methods to show how this cycle of learning and use can explain some of the fundamental structural features shared by all languages - for example, the fact that all languages exploit regular rules for generating meaningful expressions allows languages to be both relatively learnable but also exceptionally powerful tools for communication. In this talk I’ll briefly review this older work on the evolution of regularity, then apply the same approach to understanding exceptions to those regular rules. Within individual languages, exceptions and irregularities tend not to be distributed randomly - idiosyncratic exceptions tend to occur for high-frequency items, with low-frequency items following the general regular rule. And languages spoken in small, isolated communities tend to have more irregularities, exceptions, and complexity in general than languages (like English) spoken in large heterogeneous communities. I’ll describe a recent series of experiments, using artificial language learning and iterated learning methods, showing how this distribution of irregularity within and across languages can be explained as a consequence of the same processes of learning and use that account for linguistic regularity.

Zoom Link: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/96311783680?pwd=3bjoGarpLnDvUWaZ1tso3Ef1x0taP6.1 
Meeting ID: 963 1178 3680