Font: Màster en Lingüística Teòrica i Aplicada (UPF)

Research Talk
Dimarts/Tuesday, 20/11/2012, 18:30,
Aula/Room: Pendent

Linguistic representations constrain rule learning over consonants and vowels
Juan Manuel Toro,  Center for Brain and Cognition, UPF

Abstract:
Studies with both human adults and infants have demonstrated that early stages of linguistic processing involve general computational mechanisms that extract statistical and rule-like dependencies from the input. Even though these mechanisms operate over a wide array of stimuli and modalities, they are heavily constrained when applied to speech. Here, I present a series of experiments that suggest that language “guides” rule learning. In linguistics, it has been shown that consonants and vowels play different roles. Consonants are more heavily involved in lexical access, while vowels are the main carriers of prosody. This “division of labor” is reflected in how structures are extracted from speech. While statistical computations are preferentially made over consonants, rules are preferentially learned over vowels. Importantly, these differences do not seem to emerge from low-level acoustic differences, but rather they seem to be the result of how humans, and not other animals, represent elements in language.

Sessió oberta als estudiants de màster, doctorat i professorat. Al finalitzar la presentació hi haurà una petita recepció.