Speaker: Emma Nguyen (UConn Linguistics)

Title: Using developmental modeling to specify learning and representation of the passive in English children

Date and time: Thursday, 12/6, 5-6pm

Location: 46-5165

Abstract: 

Complete knowledge of the passive takes significant time to develop in English children. Building on prior work identifying the importance of lexical factors for this process, we specify a Bayesian learning model that can capture experimentally-observed passivization behavior in five-year-olds, given child-directed speech to learn from. Through this developmental model, we identify (i) how English children may be integrating lexical feature information, and (ii) how costly they may view the passive structure to be.

About CompLang:

CompLang is a student-run discussion group on language and computation. The aim of the group is to bring together the language community at MIT and nearby, learn about each other's research, and foster cross-laboratory collaborations. The broad topic of the meetings is using computational models to study scientific questions about language. We will discuss work from computational linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science, natural language processing and formal linguistics. Please visit http://complang.mit.edu for future events.