Week of Oct 21

Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series

The third talk for Harvard Linguistics Colloquium Talk Series of the semester will take place this Friday at 12pm. Please see the details below. There will be a lunch reception held afterwards in the department. See you all there! 

Title: Movement in Sign Languages

Speaker: Donna Jo Napoli (Swarthmore College)

Time: Friday Oct 25th @ 12 - 1:30 pm

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

Abstract: This work is based on work of Donna Jo Napoli and Cornelia Loos. Languages need to express speed and distance of movement of an object.  Sign languages are highly iconic, but the manual articulators are anatomically limited and subject to the drive for ease of articulation, so they must be resourceful in depicting great speed/distance. In this talk we look at factive and fictive motion in the sign language literature of seven languages and uncover possibilities in sign that are absent in spoken languages and manual behavior that requires an overhaul of sign morphology.

LangCog 

The next LangCog meeting of the semester will be on Tuesday, October 22th from 5:30-7:00pm. It will take place in William James Hall, Room #1550. Our speaker is Roman Feiman (Brown University) 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 our website.

Speaker: Roman Feiman 

Title: Distinguishing children's concepts from non-conceptual representations: The case study of possibility representations

Abstract: Concepts are the building blocks of thoughts. And thoughts are the built-up (complex, structured) mental representations that people can express with utterances in a natural language, once they've learned one. When researchers who are interested in childrens' concepts study word learning, they infer that knowing a particular word indicates having a particular concept, usually relying on evidence that children use or understand that word in different complex expressions. But children might have concepts before they've learned which words express them. To study whether children have some particular concept before they've learned the word, researchers have tested what children can do, looking for plausible, non-verbal behavioral consequences of having vs. not having that concept.

Although I've used this approach myself, I'm worried about it. In this talk, I'll tell you what makes me worry in principle, and show you experimental evidence that makes me worry in practice. As a case study, I'll use the ongoing debate about whether young children have concepts of possibility before they learn how possibilites are expressed in language. I'll show evidence that adults have non-conceptual representations of possibilities that leave the kinds of signatures that have previously been taken to diagnose concepts in young children. This evidence suggests that success on some behavioral measures may overestimate children's conceptual development. I'll also show positive evidence that children already talk about possibilities (with conditionals) by age two. This evidence suggests that "failure" on other behavioral measures may underestimate children's conceptual development. If we have time, I'll end on a more optimistic note, sketching some behavioral, non-linguistic tests that I think have a better chance of identifying concepts in young children.