Balancing Input and Imagination
A talk by Western Linguistics alum Marten van Schijndel
Date & Time
Thursday, April 25, 4-5 P.M.
Location
Miller Hall 154 & on Zoom
Abstract
Humans have processing limitations which mean that during incremental language processing, they must balance generating predictions of upcoming material with integrating different aspects of the input signal in real-time. This talk will discuss computational and experimental psycholinguistic work that explores the tradeoffs humans make between predictive processing and incorporating different types of linguistic input (e.g., phonotactics, syntax, discourse), during incremental language comprehension.
AA/EO. For disability accommodation, please contact Sara Helms, 360-650-3914, helmss@wwu.edu
Marten is an assistant professor of linguistics at Cornell University. He is very interested in the incremental representations that humans use to process language, and in differences between how language is used and how it is processed. To explore these topics, he studies the relationships between computational language models and psycholinguistic data (e.g., reading times) and studies neural network representations of language to understand what aspects of language can be learned from language statistics directly without having experiences in the real world (i.e. through ungrounded learning).