[lingtalks] CRL talk: Jeff Elman Rumelhart Talk 10/9 at 4pm

[Arielle Borovsky]

Come by next Tuesday (10/9) to see Jeff Elman's Rumelhart talk!

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CRL Happy Half Hour @ 2:30 in CSB 215
CRL Talk by Jeff Elman @ 4 in CSB 003
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Please note that the Happy Half Hour will be an earlier than usual time -
please stop by to meet and greet the CRL community!

The talk will also be held in CSB 003 -- not CSB 280 -- for this week only!

"On words and dinosaur bones: Where is meaning?"
Jeff Elman
University of California, San Diego

ABSTRACT

Virtually all theories of linguistics and of language processing assume
the language users possess a mental dictionary - the mental lexicon - in
which is stored critical knowledge of words. In recent years, the
information that is assumed to be packed into the lexicon has grown
significantly. The role of context in modulating the interpretation of
words has also become increasingly apparent. Indeed, there exists now an
embarrassment of riches which threatens the representational capacity of
the lexicon.

In this talk I will review some of these results, including recent
experimental work from adult psycholinguistics and child language
acquisition, and suggest that the concept of a lexicon may be stretched
to the point where it is useful to consider alternative ways of
capturing the knowledge that language users have of words.

Following an idea suggested by Dave Rumelhart in the late 1970s, I will
propose that rather than thinking of words as static representations
that are subject to mental processing-operands, in other words-they
might be better understood as operators, entities that operate directly
on mental states in what can be formally understood as a dynamical
system. These effects are lawful and predictable, and it is these
regularities that we intuitively take as evidence of word knowledge.
This shift from words as operands to words as operators offers insights
into a number of phenomena that I will discuss at the end of the talk.
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