Bernhard Angele at Cognitive Brown Bag

Bernhard Angele of Bournemouth University (UK) will give the Brown Bag presentation on Wednesday March 23 from 12-1:20 in Tobin 521B. A title and abstract of his talk follows.

Title:

They’re onto us! The phenomenon of participants detecting display changes and what it can tell us about the reading process

Abstract:

In the boundary change paradigm (Rayner, 1975), when a reader's eyes cross an invisible boundary location, a preview word is replaced by a target word. Readers are generally unaware of such changes due to saccadic suppression. However, some readers detect changes on a few trials and a small percentage of them detect many changes. I will present three experiments which combined eye movement data with signal detection analyses to investigate display change detection. On each trial, readers had to indicate if they saw a display change in addition to reading for meaning. On half the trials the display change occurred during the saccade (immediate condition); on the other half, it was slowed by 15–25 ms (delay condition) to increase the likelihood that achange would be detected; we also manipulated the properties of the parafoveal preview word. Using this new paradigm, we found that subjects were (1) highly sensitive to display change delays, and (2) more sensitive to display changes which involved a change of letter identity (e.g. jNxVa to gReEn) than to display changes which involved a change of visual features, but kept letter identity constant (e.g. gReEn to GrEeN). Finally, (3) subjects were significantly more sensitive to display changes when the change was from a non-wordlike preview (xbtchp to garden) than when the change was from a wordlike preview (puvtur to garden), but the preview benefit effect on the target word was not affected by whether the preview was wordlike or non-wordlike. Additionally, we did not find any influence of pre-boundary wordfrequency on display change detection performance. Our results suggest that display change detection and lexical processing do not use the same cognitive mechanisms. We propose that parafoveal processing takes place in two stages: an early, orthography-based, pre-attentional stage, and a late, attention-dependent lexical access stage.

UQAM Cognitive Science Summer School

Host Institution: Université du Québec à MontréalCoordinating Institution: Université du Québec à Montréal

Website: http://www.summer16.isc.uqam.ca/page/renseignement.php?lang_id=2

Dates: 20-Jun-2016 - 01-Jul-2016

Location: Montréal, Québec, Canada

Focus: Reasoning is an important component of human cognitive ability, and, as such, it is investigated by an extremely broad range of disciplines and interdisciplinary endeavors, including many branches of linguistics. The University of Quebec at Montreal thus welcomes linguists and language scholars interested in reasoning to attend its two-week summer school that focuses on this theme.Minimum Education Level: BA

Description:Registration is now open for UQAM's Cognitive Science Summer School, taking place from June 20 to July 1 2016 on our campus in downtown Montreal, just steps from Jazz Fest and other cultural activites. This year's theme is 'Reasoning' and the two-week program covers topics related to a wide range of linguistic subdisciplines including language acquisition, pragmatics, modality, computational linguistics, and Bayesian psycholinguistics in addition to other areas of cognitive science. An ensemble of more than 50 internationally-renowned researchers will team teach these topics via lectures and discussions, held entirely in English. We welcome the participation of graduate students as well as post-graduate scholars, faculty and other professionals. Continuing education or course credit may be possible.

For further details, including the full program and list of instructors, see the summer school website. 

Linguistic Field(s):

Cognitive Science

Computational Linguistics

Language Acquisition

Linguistic Theories

Philosophy of Language

Pragmatics

Psycholinguistics

Semantics

Tuition: 150 CAD

Registration: 01-Feb-2016 to 17-Jun-2016

Contact Person: Elizabeth Allyn Smith

Email: eallynsmithaddress-marker.gifgmail.com

Matt Wagers spoke on Wednesday

Matt Wagers (UCSC) gave an impromptu talk at the Psycholinguistics Workshop last Tuesday, Oct. 6. The title of his talk was “I see nothing! Processing phonetically-null DPs in a verb-initial language."

Gerry Altman at Cognitive Brown Bag

Gerry Altmann of UConn Psychology will be giving the Cognitive Brown Bag on Wednesday, 10/7, at 12:00 in Tobin 521B.  The abstract for the untitled talk is:

Language is often used to describe the changes that occur around us – changes in either state (“I cracked the glass…”) or location (“I moved the glass onto the table…”). To fully comprehend such events requires that we represent the ‘before’ and ‘after’ states of any object that undergoes change. But how do we represent these mutually exclusive states of a single object at the same time? I shall summarize a series of studies, primarily from fMRI, which show that we do represent such alternative states, and that these alternative states compete with one another in much the same way as alternative interpretations of an ambiguous word might compete. This interference, or competition, manifests in a part of the brain that has been implicated in resolving competition. Furthermore, activity in this area is predicted by the dissimilarity, elsewhere in the brain, between sensorimotor instantiations of the described object’s distinct states. I shall end with the beginnings of a new account of event representation which does away with the traditional distinctions between actions, participants, time, and space. [Prior knowledge of the brain is neither presumed, required, nor advantageous!].

Cog Sci Mixer

Deniz Ozyildiz writes:

In order for us, the grad students involved in the UMass Cognitive Science initiative, to get acquainted with each other, both personally and professionally, it's a good idea to get together and chat! So I'm trying to set up a date for the first CogSci mixer of the fall semester. We had a few similar events last year and they were successful and fun!
If you're interested in attending the mixer, please fill out the doodle poll below. http://doodle.com/poll/88w4u3ee9f4ecd83

We'll meet at a local cafe or restaurant. Everybody will have the opportunity to present themselves and give a quick, informal overview of their work and their interests. 

If you can't make it on any of these dates, but you're interested in meeting everybody, please let me know so that we can arrange for another date.

Please also circulate the information to your department and to everybody who you think might be interested. People can also sign up to be on our website and mailing lists:
http://blogs.umass.edu/cogsci/contact-and-mailing-lists/

Chuck Clifton speaks on Wednesday

Chuck Clifton (Psychology) will give the first cognitive brown bag talk this semester on Wednesday, September 16, at noon in Tobin 521B. The title and abstract follow.

How readers and listeners use their knowledge of grammar - and how they go beyond it

The realization that our ability to produce and comprehend language requires use of detailed and elaborate knowledge of syntax fueled the cognitive revolution of the 1960s. Over the following 20 years, we learned a great deal about how readers and listeners used this knowledge in real time to interpret sentences. The success of these analyses of how language comprehension was driven by grammatical knowledge led to competing analyses, emphasizing how various sources of extra-grammatical knowledge contribute to language comprehension. In the years since the peak of the debate between these contrasting positions, more nuanced approaches have developed. These approaches extend the analysis of grammar's contributions to incorporate effects of prosody, semantics, and pragmatics, and recognize that different types of grammatical relations might be processed differently. Other recent approaches have gone beyond grammar to consider the role language statistics might play in comprehension. Currently, my colleagues and I are exploring how language users employ their knowledge of what speakers and writers are likely to intend, and what kinds of errors they are likely to make in producing language, to arrive at interpretations of sentences that violate the grammatical requirements of the language.

In the first part of this talk, I will summarize the changing views of how we comprehend what we read and hear, providing illustrations of theoretical claims and examples of experimental evidence. In the second part of the talk, I will describe some of the work my colleagues and I are currently doing on what we call "acceptable ungrammaticality," in which readers' and listeners' interpretations of language are guided by what they know of how writers and speakers can misuse the grammar of their language.

Psycholinguistic Workshop

Amanda Rysling writes:

The Psycholinguistics Workshop this semester will meet on Thursdays from 11:30 to 12:45 in N400.
There are also going to be some talks or events not at that time, which will be announced on the ling-psych mailing list. Anyone who wants to present something, whether at a daytime meeting or during a special evening/reading group session, should let me know. 

Pater, Pizzo and Staub

Joe Pater writes:

I have been in Paris this year at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, on a Research in Paris Fellowship from the City of Paris, hosted by Sharon Peperkamp. Presley Pizzo will be visiting the LSCP next week to give a presentation on Speriment, software she has written for designing web-based experiments that are hosted by PsiTurk.

https://github.com/presleyp/Speriment

https://psiturk.org

In case you happen to be in Paris, the meeting will take place the Salle de Réunion in the Pavillon Jardin of the LSCP at 29 rue d’Ulm from 14:00 to 16:00 next Wednesday May 20th. 
I was also an international chair at the LabEx-EFL, and June 16th in Paris he will be participating in a roundtable with two other LabEx-EFL chairs, Mark Liberman and Adrian Staub. Adrian, of UMass Cognitive Psychology, will also be giving a series of lectures in June (http://www.labex-efl.org/?q=en/node/305)

David Caplan at brown bag on Wednesday

David Caplan (Harvard Medical School) will be giving the cognitive brown bag on Wednesday, September 24, at noon in Tobin 521B. The title and abstract follow.

Disorders of Syntactic Comprehension

This talk will review eleven models that have been proposed regarding the deficit(s) that produce syntactic comprehension disorders in people with aphasia due to stroke. These models will be evaluated in relation to existing data in the literature and unpublished data from 61 people with aphasia who were tested for the ability to understand 11 sentence types using self-paced listening and sentence picture matching.

UMass at AMLaP XX

The 2014 Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing conference will be hosted by the University of Edinburgh from Wednesday, September 3, through Saturday, September 6. UMass students, faculty and alumni are well-represented. Chuck Clifton will be chairing a panel discussion entitled "The Past, Present and Future of Psycholinguistics,” and the following papers are on the schedule:

"Ambiguity advantages in attachment and pronominal reference: Evidence from eye movements during reading” by Margaret Grant, Brian Dillon and Shayne Sloggett

"Adjective sprouting in much-less ellipsis” by alumni Katy Carlson and Jesse Harris.

"SNAP judgments: Small N acceptability paradigm (SNAP) for linguistic judgments” by Jeremy Hartman, with Kyle Mahowald, Peter Graff and Edward Gibson.

Cognitive Science Initiative meetings

Joe Pater writes:

Following the success of our "Grad student mixer", we've decided to go with a relatively informal organization for the Cognitive Science Initiative, at least for the summer (that is, we won't try to form an official steering committee yet). 

We'll have two meetings at which all interested faculty and graduate students will be welcome. We'll discuss the activities of our proto-Institute for the upcoming academic year (creation of new website, workshop(s), launch of scholars program...).

Here are the times for your calendar - like the mixer, the meetings will be at the Amherst Brewing Company. We'll likely have a full group roundtable starting shortly after 3, and try to leave some time for smaller group discussions afterwards.

Meeting 1: June 11th 3-5
Meeting 2: July 16th 3-5 

Faculty interested in getting on the mailing list should fill out this google form

And graduate students should use this one.

Katja Poellmann talks at Brown Bag on Wednesday

Alexandra Jesse writes:

This is a reminder that Katja Poellmann (Northeastern University) is giving a talk this week in the Cognitive Psychology Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15). The title of the talk is "The many ways listeners adapt to reductions in casual speech".

The abstract is:

Three eye-tracking experiments tested whether native listeners recognized reduced Dutch words better after having heard the same reduced words, or different reduced words of the same reduction type and whether familiarization with one reduction type helps listeners to deal with another reduction type. In the exposure phase, Group 1 was exposed to /b/-reductions (e.g., manaan instead of banaan, 'banana') and Group 2 was exposed to full-vowel deletions (e.g., p'raat instead of paraat, 'ready'), while a control group did not hear any reductions. In the test phase, all three groups heard the same speaker producing reduced-/b/ and deleted-vowel words that were either repeated (Experiments 1 & 2) or new (Experiment 3). Word-specific learning effects were found for vowel-deletions, but not for /b/-reductions. Generalization of learning to new words of the same reduction type occurred only if the exposure words showed a phonologically consistent reduction pattern (/b/-reductions). In contrast, generalization of learning to words of another reduction type occurred only if the exposure words showed a phonologically inconsistent reduction pattern (the vowel deletions; learning about them generalized to recognition of the /b/-reductions). In order to deal with reductions, listeners thus use various means. They store reduced variants (e.g., for the inconsistent vowel-deleted words) and they abstract over incoming information to build up and apply mapping rules (e.g., for the consistent /b/-reductions). Experience with inconsistent pronunciations leads to greater perceptual flexibility in dealing with other forms of reduction uttered by the same speaker than experience with consistent pronunciations.

Jeff Moher talks this Wednesday

Alexandra Jesse writes:

This is a reminder that Jeff Moher (Brown) is giving a talk this week in the Cognitive Psychology Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15).

The title of the talk is "Distractor suppression in attention and action".

The abstract is:

Human behavior is frequently interrupted by distractions, from billboards to noisy neighbors to email notifications.   I will present work that addresses how and when distractor suppression mechanisms improve task performance by minimizing interference from task-irrelevant objects. Using a variety of methodologies including eye tracking, 3D reach tracking, and electroencephalography, we have found evidence for multiple distinct distractor suppression mechanisms that may be implemented through both implicit learning and explicit cueing. In some cases, even interference from perceptually salient distractors can be mitigated.  Together, these data highlight the critical role that distractor interference and distractor suppression play in both attention and goal-directed action. 

Sean Kang at Brown Bag

Alexandra Jesse writes:

This is just a reminder that Sean Kang is giving a talk this week in our Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15). The title of the talk is "Applying Cognitive Science Principles to Promote Durable and Efficient Learning".

The abstract is:

Do tests only measure learning, or can they also promote learning? Should students review/practise the material they are trying to learn soon after they encounter the material or should they wait a while? During practice, should items of the same type/topic be grouped together or should they be interspersed among items of other types/topics? How we learn best may not correspond to how we think we learn best. I will talk about how basic research in cognitive psychology has yielded (nonobvious) principles about human learning and memory that have practical implications for instruction.

Nathaniel Smith speaks on Wednesday

Nathaniel Smith, a Research Associate at the University of Edinburgh School of Informatics, will give a talk at 12:00 on Wednesday, Feb. 26, in Tobin 521B. The title of his talk is ''Building a Bayesian bridge between the physics and the phenomenology of social interaction.’’ An abstract follows.

What is word meaning, and where does it live? Both naive intuition andscientific theories in fields such as discourse analysis and socio-and cognitive linguistics place word meanings, at least in part,outside the head: in important ways, they are properties of speechcommunities rather than individual speakers. Yet, from aneuroscientific perspective, we know that actual speakers andlisteners have no access to such consensus meanings: the physicalprocesses which generate word tokens in usage can only depend directlyon the idiosyncratic goals, history, and mental state of a singleindividual. It is not clear how these perspectives can be reconciled.This gulf is thrown into sharp perspective by current Bayesian modelsof language processing: models of learning have taken the formerperspective, and models of pragmatic inference and implicature havetaken the latter. As a result, these two families of models, thoughbuilt using the same mathematical framework and often by the samepeople, turn out to contain formally incompatible assumptions.

Here, I'll present the first Bayesian model which can simultaneouslylearn word meanings and perform pragmatic inference. In addition tocapturing standard phenomena in both of these literatures, it givesinsight into how the literal meaning of words like "some" can beacquired from observations of pragmatically strengthened uses, andprovides a theory of how novel, task-appropriate linguisticconventions arise and persist within a single dialogue, such as occursin the well-known phenomenon of lexical alignment. Over longer timescales such effects should accumulate to produce language change;however, unlike traditional iterated learning models, our simulatedagents do not converge on a sample from their prior, but instead showan emergent bias towards belief in more useful lexicons. Our modelalso makes the interesting prediction that different classes ofimplicature should be differentially likely to conventionalize overtime.  Finally, I'll argue that the mathematical "trick" needed toconvince word learning and pragmatics to work together in the samemodel is in fact capturing a real truth about the psychologicalmechanisms needed to support human culture, and, more speculatively,suggest that it may point the way towards a general mechanism forreconciling qualitative, externalist theories of social interactionwith quantitative, internalist models of low-level perception andaction, while preserving the key claims of both approaches.

Fava at Cognitive Colloquium on Wednesday

Alexandra Jesse writes:

This is just a reminder that Eswen Fava is giving a talk this week in our Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15). The title of the talk is "Examining how environment and experience influence speech processing during infancy".

The abstract is:
We will examine how speech and visual perception and processing are influenced by different types of experiences and environments. The bulk of the talk will discuss a series of neurophysiological studies that explore how infants process different types of complex auditory stimuli, including speech and music.  We will discuss what neural resources are used to process these stimuli and the role biological maturation and experience.  Finally, we will explore current data and future directions that employ longitudinal training paradigms that enable us to examine how specific types of experiences with speech influence visual perception and attention.

Jeff Moher at Cog Sci Brown Bag

Alexandra Jesse writes:

This is a reminder that Jeff Moher (Brown) is giving a talk this week in the Cognitive Psychology Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15). The title of the talk is "Distractor suppression in attention and action".

Workshop on Gradability and Quantity

The 'McGill/MIT Workshop on Gradability and Quantity in Language and  the Brain' is a two day workshop that brings together a group of  neuroscientists with an interest in language and a group of  experimental and formal linguists interested in the brain, in an  attempt to enhance the dialogue between the linguistic and the  neurophysiological cultures, and help to close the gap between these  two growing groups of researchers. The theme of the workshop is  centered on aspects of gradability and quantity as it pertains to the  cognitive domains of Number, Space, and Time.

The Workshop meets this Friday and Saturday (Jan. 31- Feb. 1) at MIT 32-141. The workshop is open and all are welcome to attend.  For more information about the schedule and talks, go here.

Schedule for Cognitive Colloquium

Alexandra Jesse writes:

Below is a preliminary schedule for our Cognitive Colloquium for this semester. As always, we meet on Wednesdays in Tobin 521B at 12:00 noon. We won't meet every week, since due to our job searches, I have been asked to limit the number of talks. This may also mean that we have to meet occasionally in a different location - look out for room changes in my reminder emails. My apologies to all of you who had suggested someone (or volunteered) who couldn't be scheduled. I will try to consider these suggestions for the Fall.

Feb 5 - Jeff Moher
Feb 19 - Eswen Fawa
Feb 26 - Nathaniel Smith
March 5 - Sean Kang
March 19 - Spring break
March 26 - Katja Poellmann
April 2 - Evan Heit
April 9 - Ben Zobel
April 16 - Lisa Fiorenzo
April 30 - Monica Bennett

If you have suggestions for Fall speakers, please send them to me.

Joshua Levy on Wednesday

Joshua Levy will give the brown bag lunch talk in Psychology on Wednesday, October 30th, in Tobin 521B from 12:00-1:15.  The title of his talk is "Resolution of Reflexive Dependencies: Is binding theory enough?” All are welcome!