School of Computer Science Seminar Professor Kenny Smith, University of Edinburgh

Professor Kenny Smith, University of Edinburgh, will present How learning and use shape evolving linguistic systems

Abstract: Languages persist through a cycle of learning and use – we learn the language of our community through immersion in that language, and in using that language to meet our communicative goals we generate more linguistic data which others learn from in turn. We use agent-based computational models and psycholinguistic experiments to simulate this process and show how biases in learning and use can explain some of the fundamental structural features shared by all languages. For example, the fact that languages exploit regular compositional rules for generating meaningful expressions allows languages to be relatively learnable but also exceptionally powerful tools for communication, and we can show that this structure arises naturally as languages adapt to pressures for compression and expressivity inherent in the processes of learning and use through which they are transmitted. In this talk I'll review these older findings, then apply the same approach to understanding exceptions to those regular rules. Within individual languages, exceptions and irregularities tend not to be distributed randomly – idiosyncratic exceptions tend to occur for high-frequency items, with low-frequency items following the general regular rule. And languages spoken in small, isolated communities tend to have more irregularities, exceptions, and complexity in general than languages (like English) spoken in large heterogeneous communities. I'll describe a series of experiments and models showing how this distribution of irregularity within and across languages can be explained as a consequence of the same processes of learning and use that account for linguistic regularity.

Bio: I am Professor of Evolutionary Linguistics and the Director of the Centre for Language Evolution in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. I use computational and experimental methods to study the evolution of language and the human capacity for language. I am particularly interested in how languages are shaped by their repeated learning and use, and how this cultural evolutionary process in turn shapes the cognitive capacities underpinning language learning.

This is a hybrid event.