Colloquia and Talks
Conferences and Calls for Papers
Spring Semester Reading Groups

(Cognitive Science Lecture)How knowledge of linguistic structure and knowledge of the lexicon interact during language development and use

A child's language development has enormous consequences. We know that most of children's knowledge about language will not, and cannot, be acquired through explicit instruction. This has raised interest in implicit and statistical learning theories of language acquisition. One important criticism of statistical learning theories is that they are underspecified. What are the units over which they operate, both in terms of modality (linguistic vs. world knowledge) and grain size (features vs. objects, or phonemes vs. morphemes vs. words vs. phrases)?

In my talk, I will be discussing these issues in relation to some of my work, most of which has dealt with the relationship between a person's knowledge of the lexicon (or word meaning) and their knowledge of other aspects of linguistic knowledge, such as linguistic structure or syntax. Using a combination of corpus analyses, behavioral experiments with infants, children, and adults, and computational models, I will argue that knowledge of the lexicon and knowledge of linguistic structure form a bidirectional and coupled system, whereby learning about one can help bootstrap the learning of the other. Formalizing this system is an important step for statistical theories of learning and allowing it to make useful (and falsifiable) predictions about the nature of language acquisition.

Dissertation defense by Nikole Miller

Nikole Miller's dissertation defense has been scheduled for Monday, May 7, 10:00 am in the Distinguished Alumni Room, Indiana Memorial Union.

A reception will be held immediately following in Ballantine Hall 004.

All faculty and graduate students are encouraged to attend. As a courtesy, if you are planning on attending, please send an e-mail to the chair of the dissertation committee, Clancy Clements (clements@indiana.edu) to let him know you plan to be there.

Linguistics Department End of year get-together

The annual end of the year get together is scheduled for Thursday, May 3 from 12:15-2:15pm in Memorial Hall 317A. The department will be presenting various annual departmental awards. Food and drink will be provided, but please bring a dish if you can!

The 18th Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference (GLAC-18) and The 7th Studies in the History of the English Language Conference (SHEL-7)

GLAC-18 and SHEL-7 will be held concurrently at Indiana University Bloomington this year. More information about these conferences can be found here.

Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 21 (The Third Indiana Meeting)

Invited Speakers:
Zeljko Boskovic, University of Connecticut
Damir Cavar, Eastern Michigan University
Tania Ionin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

FASL 21 will be preceded by a SPECIAL SESSION on Computational Approaches to Slavic Languages 10-11 May 2012 and followed by a free Workshop in Slavic Linguistics 14-17 May 2012.

Abstracts are invited for 30-minute presentations (plus 10 minutes discussion) on any topic dealing with formal aspects of Slavic syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology, phonetics, including language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics. Computational talks will be organized into the special session.

Abstracts are limited to TWO PAGES and should be ANONYMOUS. Abstract submissions should be made via the EasyChair Conference System. Specific instructions will be made available on the conference website: http://www.indiana.edu/~iuslavic/fasl21.shtml.

Authors are advised to re-check examples and glosses with speakers of the languages involved.

The deadline for abstracts has been EXTENDED to 5 FEBRUARY 2012. After that, there will be no extensions. We hope to make a program available by 15 MARCH 2012.

CLingDing: Computational Linguistics Hour

There are no more CLingDing talks scheduled for this semester. Please check back in the Fall for more.