Week of Nov 4

Halloween Party

The department held a Halloween party on the spooky Oct 31! A huge thank you to all those who dressed up with excellent (non-)linguistic ideas. There was also a costume contest and the big winner is….Kevin Ryan(!), who received the highest number of votes in the faculty category AND the highest number of votes overall! 

Also, thank you so much Anabelle, for organising this excellent event and making the certificates! 

LangCog 

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on Tuesday, November 5th from 5:30-7:00pm. It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1550. Our speaker is Wataru Uegaki (University of Edinburgh) and the title and abstract of the talk can be found below. Food will be available at the meeting, and you can find the schedule for the remainder of the semester on their website.

Speaker: Wataru Uegaki

Title: Lexicalization, compositionality, and communicative efficiency: The case of deontic priority
(Joint work with Anne Mucha and James Engels)

Abstract: A number of cross-linguistically common patterns in semantics have been given accounts in terms of the notion of communicative efficiency, i.e., optimal trade-offs between cognitive cost and communicative accuracy (Kemp & Regier 2012; Regier et al. 2015; Kemp et al. 2018; Imel & Steinert-Threlkeld 2021; Steinert-Threlkeld 2021; Denić et al. 2022; Uegaki 2024). In this talk, we extend the analysis to a new empirical generalization concerning the lexicalization of impossibility modality, which we refer to as Deontic Priority (DP) (Uegaki, Mucha et al. 2024). The generalization can be stated as follows:

Deontic Priority: if a modal lexical item can express any impossibility, then it can express deontic impossibility.

We hypothesise an account of DP in term of communicative efficiency. In particular, we suggest that the effect comes from optimising the pressure to reduce the cognitive cost of the system (by conveying meanings through lexical forms as opposed to compositional forms) and the pressure to communicate the flavours accurately (by reducing flavour ambiguity), crucially in the presence of a utility bias for deontic flavours. We report on experiments that are aimed to support this hypothesis: a rating experiment to ground the utility bias; and a series of dyadic/interactive artificial-language learning experiments (Kanwal et al. 2017) to examine whether the DP effect arises in the presence of the combined pressure from cognitive cost and communicative accuracy.

Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series 

Liina Pylkkänen will be giving a talk as part of the Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series on Friday Nov 8th at 12pm. Please see the details below. There will be a lunch reception held afterwards in the department; hope to see many of you there!

Title:  LANGUAGE AT A GLANCE: How do our brains order syntactic and semantic computations when no temporal order is imposed from the input?

Speaker: Liina Pylkkänen, New York University

Time: Friday Nov 8th, 12pm

Location: The Fong Auditorium, Boylston Hall (1st floor)

Abstract: Language can be expressed and received through various modalities, such as sound, sight, and touch. Each modality has its own temporal dynamics, including different degrees of serialism and parallelism. In the neurobiology of language, we are limited by the fact that for each study, we must choose some specific modality. This hinders our ability to discern whether the observed results stem from properties of language or modality-specific dynamics. Comparing modalities directly is a slow way to uncover any inherent modality independent organization within the language system. In this talk, I discuss new work in which we approach this question from a different angle and ask: How does the language system organize itself when the input lacks temporal sequencing, allowing the brain to order computations in whatever way is natural? That organization should be a useful window into the brain’s inherent way to travel from form to meaning. We present short written sentences all at once, quickly enough to eliminate eye movements, in so-called rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP). Psycholinguistic work has shown that full sentences can elicit syntactic and semantic effects in RPVP even if flashed for only 200ms (Snell & Grainger, 2017). We use magnetoencephalography (MEG) to reveal the neural organization of syntactic and semantic computations for parallel visual language input. Our initial results show that in a simple matching task, grammatical sentences in RPVP drive increased neural activity in left fronto-temporal cortex starting at ~200ms after sentence onset as compared to word lists. By varying the linguistic properties of the sentences, we aim to characterize the spatiotemporal organization of syntactic and semantic computations for a stimulus that does not itself impose any order. Further, since a parallel stimulus does not unfold over time, it gives us a measure of how input is mapped to knowledge in the absence of predictions from a temporally preceding context.