Seminars

When we communicate using language, we must choose what to say and how to say it, and these decisions about framing can influence how people think, feel, and act. Consider the statement “Girls are just as good as boys at math.” Although it appears to express an equivalence between groups, this construction leads more people to endorse stereotypes about boys’ natural math ability compared to a statement with the positions of the groups reversed. While traditional accounts view framing effects as irrational byproducts of biased processing, I present an alternative explanation grounded in pragmatic reasoning: Readers rationally infer that specific words and syntactic constructions communicate relevant information and incorporate this into their evaluations. Drawing on recent studies from my lab, I defend this more rational account while explaining why framing effects tend to be modest in size: when a message frame contradicts strongly held beliefs, people often resist its implications.

Intrapersonal communication is a classification of phenomena such as self-talk and imagined interactions in which communicative messages are contained within a single individual, and internal systems comprise both sender and receiver roles. The study of interpersonal communication has been deeply influenced by Shannon’s (1948) sender-receiver model, in which a sender transmits a message to a receiver, through a noisy channel, with the intention of provoking in the receiver some understanding or action. Despite various challenges, Shannon’s multiparty format, with separate senders and receivers, comprises the defining criteria of the term “communication” across a wide variety of disciplines. Intrapersonal communication, however, challenges Shannon’s multiparty distinction, and therefore, communication is often treated as a necessarily social process requiring two or more individual people. Still, intrapersonal and interpersonal communication share many features and therefore, it is likely that our rich understanding of interpersonal communication can be used to probe our much sparser understanding of intrapersonal communication. In this talk, I will present various examples of intrapersonal communication, including cases that are intuitively more communication-like (those with linguistic features) and edge cases (those without linguistic features), as well as cases that challenge the strict inter-/intrapersonal communication dichotomy. I will explore the theoretical import of these cases for both language and cognition as well as offer various applications including for clinical psychology and education. I will also present some preliminary empirical and computational work and plans for future studies and analyses. Finally, I hope to have a rich discussion and hear feedback about this recent line of research.

In natural languages, biological constraints push toward cross-linguistic homogeneity while linguistic, cultural, and historical processes promote language diversification. I focus in my talk on the effects of these opposing forces on sign languages. Research in movement science has shed light on the nature and effects of neural and motor constraints on hand use. Analyses of 33 languages revealed that signs exhibited the same form of adaptation to biological constraints found in tasks for which the hand naturally evolved (for example, grasping). Cross-linguistic comparisons also showed that signs vary cross-linguistically under the effects of linguistic, cultural, and historical processes. Their effects could thus emerge even without departing from the demands of biological constraints. New sign languages born in the last decades represent an exceptional opportunity for understanding the development of sign languages. Signs recorded at different ages of the new languages showed that biological constraints predicted sign change during language development.

Online measures of word recognition such as eyetracking have revolutionized the way we understand phonological processing in young children. However, most work in this area has only tested listeners exposed to a single dialect of a single language. In this talk I will discuss the influence of natural exposure to multiple dialects - with different distributions of phonological contrasts - on toddler’s online word recognition. Contrary to some earlier reports, we find no evidence that exposure to multiple language varieties has long-lasting detrimental effects on toddler’s word recognition efficiency. We take a glass- is-half-full view to explaining the impact of multi-accent exposure on development: We suggest that previously reported effects of accent exposure could be best captured in a developmental framework where children by 2 years of age have developed speech processing strategies best suited for their environment, and are adept at flexibly handling accents beyond a socially dominant language variety.

The evolution of vocal learning — an important component of speech and language development — in theory allows for increased communicative flexibility, compared with animals whose vocalizations are not learned. Songbirds, the most species-rich group of vocal learners, exhibit great diversity in terms of song structure and processes of inheritance. Relatively little is known about songbird vocal interactions — or how birds may learn how to sing (as opposed to simply what). In this talk, I describe research examining the vocal interactions of the dominant laboratory songbird, the male zebra finch. I show that while zebra finch song has been productively exploited for its simplicity and stereotypy as a model of sensorimotor learning and control, these gregarious, nonterritorial animals possess complex vocal repertoires that are dynamically expressed in social interactions, reminiscent of alignment phenomena that pervade human communication at multiple linguistic levels. I argue that a comparative-species perspective can offer new insights into the emergence of dynamic communication during development.

Online measures of word recognition such as eyetracking have revolutionized the way we understand phonological processing in young children. However, most work in this area has only tested listeners exposed to a single dialect of a single language. In this talk I will discuss the influence of natural exposure to multiple dialects - with different distributions of phonological contrasts - on toddler’s online word recognition. Contrary to some earlier reports, we find no evidence that exposure to multiple language varieties has long-lasting detrimental effects on toddler’s word recognition efficiency. We take a glass-is-half-full view to explaining the impact of multi-accent exposure on development: We suggest that previously reported effects of accent exposure could be best captured in a developmental framework where children by 2 years of age have developed speech processing strategies best suited for their environment, and are adept at flexibly handling accents beyond a socially dominant language variety.

In this talk, I describe a model trained to represent conversational dynamics by predicting prosodic and language output based on autoregressive input from the target speaker and their interlocutor. Separate attention mechanisms for each speaker allow us to examine which of the interlocutor's turns are considered influential for the prediction of a target turn. Using this novel approach, we formulate and evaluate several hypotheses about how a speaker's conversational speech influences that of their interlocutor (often called “entrainment”), and discuss how these attention scores can be used to sketch the discourse structure of a dialogue. These findings extend previous work on entrainment by expanding the hypothesis space to search for nonlocal and nonlinear dynamics.

Laboratory experiments from the early 1970s to the 1990s set much of the agenda for infant speech perception research to the present day, emphasizing infants’ cognitive skills and using theoretical tools given by the cognitive psychology of perceptual categorization. I will argue that it is time to reconsider. Infants are both more and less competent than we once thought. Even more important, parental speech does not appear to have the properties required and presupposed by the usual “statistical learning” accounts of category learning and word-form discovery. I will defend these points and propose that we should use different intuitions in contemplating the infant’s path toward language understanding. In particular, we should try to imagine the infant’s organic path, rather than setting the infant targets from the mature language.

The concept of cognitive reserve posits that there are brain mechanisms that allow some people to cope better than others with age-or disease-related brain changes. There are a set of life experiences that seem to be associated with greater ability to cope with brain changes. In addition research has explored differential task related activation as a potential moderator between brain change in cognition. This talk will review studies that helped develop and that support this concept, including those using epidemiologic and functional imaging approaches. I hope that we can discuss the special role that language might play in these relationships.