Language Science Colloquia

2022-2023

 

Tuesday, October 4
Terry Regier, University of California, Berkeley
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Semantic categories in computational perspective

 

Tuesday, October 11

Language Science Community Talks

Noa Attali, University of California, Irvine
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: How contextual expectations and prosody can help disambiguate quantifier-negation utterances

 

Tuesday, October 18
Naomi Feldman, University of Maryland
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Modeling early phonetic learning from natural speech

 

Tuesday, October 25
Jianjing Kuang, University of Pennsylvania
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Tone acquistion beyond 10

 

Tuesday, November 15
Brian Dillon, University of Massachusetts Amherst
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Structure-Building in real time: The View from the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing Benchmark

 

Tuesday, January 17
Ryan Cotterell, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Information-Theoretic Methods in the Study of the Lexicon

 

Tuesday, January 24
Chris Cummins, University of Edinburgh
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Inferences about implicatures

 

Tuesday, January 31
Megan Boudewyn, University of California, Santa Cruz
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Using Electrophysiology to Track Attention and Memory Engagement durng Language Comprehension

 

Tuesday, February 28
Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, University of Washington
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: TBA

 

Tuesday, March 14
Samar Husain, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: TBA

 

Tuesday, April 4
Jonathan Brennan, University of Michigan
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: TBA

 

Tuesday, April 11
Kyle Mahowald, University of Texas at Austin
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: TBA

 

Tuesday, April 18
Navin Viswanathan, Pennsylvania State University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: TBA

 

Tuesday, April 25
Seth Wiener, Carnegie Mellon University

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: TBA

 

Tuesday, May 2
John Hale, University of Georgia, Athens
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: TBA

 

Tuesday, May 16

Melinda Fricke, University of Pittsburgh
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: TBA

 

Previous Language Science Colloquia

2021-2022

Tuesday, October 19
Anne Therese Frederiksen, University of California, Irvine
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Pronoun processing in American Sign Language: What we learn from variation among and within languages

 

Tuesday, October 26
Rodrigo Ranero, University of California, Los Angeles
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Identity in ellipsis reconsidered: The view from Kaqchikel and beyond

 

Tuesday, November 2

Language Science Community Talks

Susanne Jaeggi and Jacky Au, UCI

11:00am - 12:30pm

Title: Promoting learning and achievement across the lifespan via cognitive training and brain stimulation

 

Tuesday, November 9

Simon Kirby, University of Edinburgh
9:00am - 10:30am

Title: From Item to System: how cultural evolution creates linguistic structure in an iconic modality

 

Tuesday, November 16

Language Science Community Talks

Ariel Chan, UCLA
11:00am - 12:30pm

Title: Bilingualism in different forms: What does cultural identity tell us about code-switching preferences and cognitive control?

 

Tuesday, November 23
Noga Zaslavsky, MIT

11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Efficient compression and linguistic meaning in humans and machines

 

Tuesday, January 25

Language Science Community Talks

Emma Nguyen, UCI
11:00am - 12:30pm

Title:  From one verb class to another: Viewing the acquisition of passives through the lens of lexical semantic features

 

Tuesday, February 1
Marten Van Schjindel, Cornell University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Neural Language Priming

 

Tuesday, February 15

Language Science Community Talks

Julie Washington, UCI
11:00am - 12:30pm

Title: Language Variation and Reading: Teaching African American Children to Read

 

Tuesday, February 22
Adele Goldberg, Princeton University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: Accessibility and historical change: how uncles and aunts became aunts and uncles

 

Tuesday, March 1
Letty Naigles, University of Connecticut
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title: How Nonsense Words Reveal both Strengths and Challenges
in the Linguistic Representations and Processes of Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

 

Tuesday, March 8
Kristen Syrett, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:  What does it take to learn an adjective? 

 

Wednesday, March 30
Benjamin Spector, Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS), Paris 
9:00am - 10:30am
Title:  Exhaustivity, Anti-exhaustivity and the effect of prior beliefs in the Rational Speech Act Framework

 

Tuesday, April 26
Rick Dale, UCLA 
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:  Dynamic integration and cognitive organization in natural language performance

 

Tuesday, May 3
Farrell Ackerman and Rob Malouf, UCSD 
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:  Understanding language particular morphological systems in order to discover general principles of morphological organization

 

Tuesday, May 10

Language Science Community Talks

Andrea Takahesu-Tabori, UCI
11:00am - 12:30pm
Title:  Impact of individual differences in ambient language diversity and cognitive control ability for L3 learning of Spanish grammatical gender by Mandarin-English bilinguals

 

Wednesday, June 1
Nick Chater, University of Warwick   
9:00am - 10:30am
Title:  Virtual bargaining: The hidden logic of joint action and communication

 

2020-2021

Tuesday, October 20
Damián Blasi, Harvard University
11:00am - 12:30pm
The exceptional nature of linguistic diversity and language change and why it matters for theories of language

Wednesday, November 11
Paula Rubio-Fernandez, University of Oslo
9:00am - 10:30am
The psychophysics of referential communication: Discriminability vs informativity

Tuesday, November 24
Language Science Community Talks
11:00am - 12:30pm
Andrew Cheng and Alandi Bates

Tuesday, December 8
Jeff Heinz, Stony Brook University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Deterministic Analyses and Learning of Optional Phonological Processes

Tuesday, December 15
Evelina Fedorenko, MIT
11:00am - 12:30pm
The language system in the human mind and brain

 

Tuesday, February 2
Kasia Hitczenko, Northwestern University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Modeling speech perception and phonetic learning from naturalistic speech.

 

Thursday, February 4
Xin Xie, University of Rochester
11:00am - 12:30pm

Navigating talker variability in speech perception.

 

Wednesday, February 10
Esti Blanco-Elorrieta, Harvard University
11:00am - 12:30pm

Towards an ecologically valid neurobiology of multilingualism.

 

Thursday, February 11

Jason Gullifer, McGill University
11:00am - 12:30pm
Bilingualism:  A socio-cognitive exercise in managing uncertainty.

 

Tuesday, February 16
Alexandra Carstensen, Stanford University
11:00am - 12:30pm

Language as a window into abstract thought.

 

Wednesday, February 17
Zara Harmon, University of Maryland
11:00am - 12:30pm
Mechanisms of overextension in language production.

 

Thursday, February 18
Connor Mayer, University of California, Los Angeles
11:00am - 12:30pm
Acquisition of speech sound categories.

 

Tuesday, April 6
Adina Williams, Facebook AI Research
11:00am - 12:30pm
Unnatural Language Inference

Tuesday, April 27
Jennifer Culbertson, University of Edinburgh
9:00am - 10:30am
Word and morpheme ordering preferences are affected by meaning, transparency, and perceptual experience 

Tuesday, May 4
Gary Lupyan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
11:00am - 12:30pm
From Telepathy to Whorf: How words structure and align our concepts

 

Tuesday, May 18
Language Science Community Talks
11:00am - 12:00pm
Industry Jobs Panel

Tuesday, June 1
Tal Linzen, NYU
11:00am - 12:30pm
Can surprisal explain syntactic disambiguation difficulty?

 

2019-2020

Monday, June 8
Remote Presentation
Tamar Gollan, UC San Diego
https://profiles.ucsd.edu/tamar.gollan

Monday, May 11
Remote Presentation
Sam Bowman, NYU
11:00am - 12:15pm
Learning acceptability judgments from raw text alone

Monday, March 2
Community Talks
Galia Bar-Sever, UC Irvine
11:00am - 11:50am, SSPB 1222

Wednesday, February 26
Linguistic Diversity Talk
Guadalupe Valdes, Stanford University
https://ed.stanford.edu/faculty/gvaldes
2:00pm - 3:30pm, HG 1030

Monday, February 24
Zoe Klemfuss, UC Irvine 
https://faculty.sites.uci.edu/klemfuss/
11:00am - 12:15pm, SSPB 1222
Causes and Effects of Narrative Variation in Childhood

 Thursday, February 6
Colin Phillips, University of Maryland
https://www.colinphillips.net/
11:00am - 12:15pm, SSPA 2112 (Room Change)
Not So Great Expectations

Monday, January 21
Amy Pratt, UC Irvine
"Identification of Spanish-English Bilingual Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD): The Differential Effect of Exposure Across Bilinguals with and without DLD"
Ashley Adams, UC Irvine
"Exploring the classroom experiences of dual language learners with and without special education needs"
11:00am - 11:50am, SSPB 1222

Monday, December 2
Karen Emmorey, San Diego State University
https://slhs.sdsu.edu/llcn/ 
11:00am - 12:15pm, SSPA 2112 (Room Change)
"The Neurobiology of Reading in Deaf and Hearing Adults"

Monday, October 14

Hannah Forsythe, Language Science UC Irvine
"Modeling the Source of Children’s Non-Adult-Like Pronoun Interpretations: Representation Versus Deployment"
Anne Therese Frederiksen, Chancellor's Postdoc Fellow UC Irvine
"Comprehension of pronouns in American Sign Language: Modality-general and modality-specific influences"
11:00am - 11:50am, SSPB 1222

Leon Bergen, UC San Diego
http://ling.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/profiles/LeonBergen.html

"Verbal Irony, Pretense, and the Common Ground"

2018-2019

Monday, June 3
Alexis Wellwood, University of Southern California
http://bcf.usc.edu/~wellwood/
"Seeing and Talking About Events"

Dylan Bumford, UCLA
http://dylanbumford.com
"Superlative Scope, Comparison Classes, and Negative Polarity"

Monday, March 11
Mark Steedman, University of Edinburgh
https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/people/staff/Mark_Steedman.html
"The Combinatory Cognitive Science of Language"

Monday, March 4
Hans Kamp, University of Stuttgart
https://www.ims.uni-stuttgart.de/institut/mitarbeiter/hans/
"DRT Tutorial"

Monday, February 11
Stephanie Shih, University of Southern California
http://www-bcf.usc.edu/~shihs/
"Catching Phonology in the Pokéverse: Cross-linguistic Comparisons in Sound Symbolism"

"The Dynamic Nature of the Bilingual Language System"

Monday, January 14
Brandy Gatlin, UC Irvine
https://www.faculty.uci.edu/profile.cfm?faculty_id=6342
"Why They Be Talkin' Like That?"  A Look at Language Variation and Literacy"

Monday, December 3
Maria Polinsky, University of Maryland
http://www.mariapolinsky.com
"It's Still About Grammar: Cascading Structural Reorganization in Bilinguals"

Monday, November 19
Stefan Th. Gries, UC Santa Barbara
http://www.linguistics.ucsb.edu/faculty/stgries/
"Quantitative Corpus Applications: Morphemes, Multi-word Units, & Constructions"

Friday November 9
Judith Kroll, UC Riverside
https://bilingualismmindbrain.com/lab-members/judith-f-kroll/
"The Fate of the Native Language in Second Language Learning: A New Hypothesis About Bilingualism, Mind, and Brain"
Talk recording

 

2017-2018

 

Monday, May 21

Kara Morgan-Short, University of Illinois at Chicago
https://lcsl.uic.edu/hispanic-italian/faculty-instructors/hispanic-linguistics/kara-morgan-short
"The Neurocognitive processing of late-learned second language: The role of external and internal factors"

Victor Ferreira, University of California, San Diego
http://www.psychology.ucsd.edu/people/profiles/vferreira.html
"Syntactic Entrainment as a Candidate Mechanism for Learning the Meanings of Syntactic Constructions"

Monday, March 19
Ede Zimmermann, Visiting Scholar, UCI (Frankfurt)
http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~tezimmer/Zimmermann/
"Montague Grammar: 50 years after"

Monday, March 12
Caroline Féry, Goethe University Frankfurt
http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~cfery/
"The Grammatical and Prosodic Reflexes of Information Structure in a Typological Comparison"

Saturday, March 3
Ede Zimmermann, Visiting Scholar, UCI (Frankfurt)
http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~tezimmer/Zimmermann/
"Second Formal Semantics Boot Camp II"

Monday, February 26
Oana David, University of California, Merced
https://ucmerced.academia.edu/OanaDavid
"The role of grammar in computer-aided metaphor research"

Saturday, Februrary 17
Ede Zimmermann, Visiting Scholar, UCI (Frankfurt)
http://user.uni-frankfurt.de/~tezimmer/Zimmermann/
"First Formal Semantics Boot Camp I"