FOS: Fw: Distinguished Speaker Lecture | Morten Christiansen, Cornell University | Monday, April 15, 6:30 pm, 118 Psychology.

[Wagner, Suzanne]

________________________________
From: cogsci-request at cogsci.msu.edu <cogsci-request at cogsci.msu.edu> on behalf of McAuley, J <dmcauley at msu.edu>
Sent: Monday, April 8, 2019 9:30 AM
To: cogsci at cogsci.msu.edu; psyfaculty at psy.msu.edu; psygrads at psy.msu.edu; coggrads at cogsci.msu.edu; cogugrads at cogsci.msu.edu; McAuley, J
Subject: [cogsci] Distinguished Speaker Lecture | Morten Christiansen, Cornell University | Monday, April 15, 6:30 pm, 118 Psychology.


Dear Colleagues:

We are pleased to be welcoming Professor Morten Christiansen from Cornell University on Monday, April 15th to give the final lecture in the 2018-2019 Cognitive Science Program Distinguished Speaker Series.  The talk is at 6:30 (please note different time) in 118 Psychology with a reception at 6. The title and abstract for the talk are below.

If you would like to meet with Professor Christiansen during his visit, please email Kaylin Smith (smit2297 at msu.edu<mailto:smit2297 at msu.edu>) by Friday, April 12th to arrange a time.

Hope to see you there.

Best,
Devin

Language evolution through the bottleneck: From milliseconds to millennia
Dr. Morten Christiansen, Cornell University

Monday, April 15 at 6:30 p.m., 118 Psychology

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.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://mailman.egr.msu.edu/mailman/public/fos/attachments/20190408/582a96f7/attachment.htm>