[lingtalks] Roger Levy Colloquium: Monday, April 13 at USC

[Karma Dolma]

The Department of Linguistics at USC proudly presents: 

Noise and memory in rational human language comprehension

Roger Levy
UC, San Diego 
http://idiom.ucsd.edu/~rlevy/



Monday, April 13, 2009 3:00 pm - 4:30 pm 
Grace Ford Salvatori 118 

Following the talk, dinner will be served in the Linguistics Conference Room
GFS 330  



Abstract: 


Considering the adversity of the conditions under which linguistic
communication takes place in everyday life---ambiguity of the signal,
environmental competition for our attention, speaker error, our limited
memory, and so forth---it is perhaps remarkable that we are as
successful at it as we are.  Perhaps the leading explanation of this
success is that (a) the linguistic signal is redundant, (b) diverse
information sources are generally available that can help us obtain
infer the intended message (or something close enough) when
comprehending an utterance, and (c) we use these diverse information
sources very quickly and to the fullest extent possible.  This
explanation can be thought of as treating language comprehension as a
rational, evidential process.  Nevertheless, there are number of
prominent phenomena reported in the sentence processing literature that
remain clear puzzles for the rational approach.  In this talk I address
three such phenomena: "good enough" sentence comprehension (Christianson
et al., 2001; Ferreira et al., 2002), local-coherence effects (Tabor et
al., 2004), and "digging-in" effects (Frazier & Rayner, 1987; Tabor &
Hutchins, 2004).  The common thread underlying these three phenomena is
an apparent failure to use information available in a sentence
appropriately in global or incremental inferences about the correct
interpretation of a sentence.  I argue that the apparent puzzle posed
by these phenomena for models of rational sentence comprehension may
derive from the failure of existing models to appropriately account for
the environmental and cognitive constraints---namely, noisy input and
limited memory---under which comprehension takes place.  I present two
new computational models of language comprehension under noisy input and
limited memory, and show that these models lead to possible solutions to
the above puzzles.  I also present new experimental results supporting
key distinctive predictions of the models.  More generally, these models
suggest how appropriately accounting for environmental and cognitive
constraints can lead to a more nuanced and ultimately more satisfactory
picture of key aspects of human cognition.




Email inquiries to: lingtalk at college.usc.edu  
http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/ling/newsevents/colloquia.shtml  


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