MTS is the department’s Mind, Technology, and Society speaker series. It is hosted by a different faculty member each semester. Founded by a generous gift from Professors Robert Glushko and Pamela Samuelson, MTS brings researchers and industry professionals from across the globe to present a variety of interdisciplinary work in cognitive science. See our UCMerced CogSci youtube channel for videos of past MTS talks!
CIS graduate students, faculty, and staff, and all who are interested are invited! Members of other departments at UC Merced as well as the general public are encouraged to attend. (Note: current CIS Ph.D. students are required to attend MTS each semester in residence, to fulfill their COGS 250 course requirement).
Emily Morgan talk "Generative and item-specific knowledge in sentence processing" will be from 2-3:30pm in SSM 104.
Abstract: How do generative linguistic knowledge and knowledge of item-specific usage preferences jointly contribute to language processing? We investigated this using two test cases: binomial expression ordering preferences (e.g. "bread and butter" vs. "butter and bread") and the dative alternation (e.g. "I gave the man a book" vs. "I gave a book to the man"). In both cases, preferences are driven by both generative constraints (e.g. short-before-long) and by item-specific experience (e.g. experience with a specific expression or idiosyncratic verb biases). Using a combination of computational models and psycholinguistic data, we quantify how generative and item-specific knowledge jointly contribute to alternation preferences, and how their contributions vary based on an item's frequency. We demonstrate substantial reliance on item-specific knowledge at much lower frequencies than has been suggested previously. We also found that item-specific experience plays an increasingly large role with increased item frequency. Our findings bring a quantitative perspective to the debate over the joint roles of generative and item-specific knowledge in language processing.
Bio: Emily Morgan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at UC Davis. She studies sentence processing using a combination of experimental psycho- and neurolinguistic methods, such as eye-tracking and ERPs, plus probabilistic computational modeling. She also studies other language-adjacent domains such as music and programming languages. https://morganlab.ucdavis.edu/ https://sites.google.com/ucdavis.edu/eimorgan/
For more information or to sign up for email announcements, please contact the talk series organizer: cis-mts-lead@lists.ucmerced.edu.
