心理语言学线上论坛 | 9月22日15:00 Nick Huang教授讲座

Speaker: Nick Huang

Title: Probing the limits of linguistic experience in our theories of language 

Time: 15:00 – 16:30 pm, 22 Sep 2021 

           (Beijing, Hong Kong time)

Venue: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/779556638

            https://cuhk.zoom.cn/j/779556638

About the speaker 

Nick Huang is an assistant professor at the Department of English Language and Literature at the National University of Singapore. He graduated from the University of Maryland with a PhD in linguistics and was a visiting postdoctoral researcher at the University of Connecticut. His main research interests are in cross-linguistic variation in language processing and grammars and how linguistic experience and cognitive biases might contribute to explain such variability. Ongoing projects of his include wh-dependencies, attitude verbs and clause structure, and the morphosyntax of Singapore English.

Probing the limits of linguistic experience in our theories of language

Nick Huang

Department of English Language and Literature, National University of Singapore

How does our experience with language shape how we learn and process it? Recent research into this classic question, especially within computational psycholinguistics and natural language processing, suggests that many behavioural and grammatical distinctions can be reasonably captured using just the statistics of easily-observed linguistic features in one’s linguistic experience.

Despite these empirical successes, I argue that a more nuanced view of the role of linguistic experience is still necessary. As support, I will discuss three case studies from different domains of psycholinguistics. The first two case studies draw from adult sentence processing, looking at cross-linguistic variability in double centre-embedding illusions (e.g. the relative acceptability of the ungrammatical The patient who the nurse who the clinic had hired called) and variability in the acceptability of English long-distance wh-questions (e.g. What did Jo think/??shout that Sam saw?). The third case study concerns how children might learn the meaning of abstract mental state verbs like think and want in English and Mandarin Chinese. I argue that “linguistic statistics” approaches, which have been proposed for these case studies, do not provide a satisfactory explanation for the data. I present evidence from experiments, computational models, and corpora to suggest that these case studies can be better accounted for by appealing to e.g. a cue-based retrieval parsing model or learning biases that involve substantial abstraction over one’s linguistic experience.

Virtual Psycholinguistics Forum: 

(https://cuhklpl.github.io/forum.html)