Department of Linguistics

The first job talk of the semester will be given by Dr. Cory Shain. Title and abstract are below. It will take place Monday, February 13, 3:00-4:30, in Turlington L007. For Zoom link, contact Ratree Wayland (ratree@ufl.edu).

Title: Uncovering the algorithmic foundations of language learning and processing

Abstract: Human language is a vastly complex communication system, and speech is transient, existing for a moment and then lost in time. Nonetheless, our brains allow us to learn language with little guidance during childhood when we are most cognitively limited, and to use it with ease as adults. In this talk, I will review how computational approaches can help us unlock the mysteries of human language abilities, and I will outline some of the key unanswered questions about how we deploy language in real time to make sense of the things we hear and read. I will then survey my research program attempting to make progress on these questions, with special attention to how two key adaptations to the demands of real-time language processing — prediction and working memory — shape how language is learned and comprehended. I will show evidence that prediction and working memory exhibit dissociable patterns in human brain activity and that the prediction and memory resources involved are specialized for language processing. I will further show that prediction and memory pressures together can support child phoneme acquisition from raw speech. Finally, I will describe planned work aimed at uncovering the mental computations involved in real-time language comprehension.