Category Archives: Uncategorized

LARC on Friday 9/16, 11:30 ILC N451

This is an invitation to the meetings of LARC (Language Acquisition Resource Center) where we are now organizing to resume sessions after Covid complications last year.

The Center focuses on language acquisition of first, second, bilingual, heritage, multilingual, dialect and indigenous languages, besides language revitalization and language disorders.  No specific theoretical background in linguistic theory or acquisition theory is required or expected to participate at the meetings.  Our meetings have always been full of lively discussions and discussion of broader topics is encouraged.  It is an excellent way to get a sense of what is going on in acquisition in any of these areas.
 

Our group has generally met in the linguistics department with graduate students, and Interested undergraduates, visitors and faculty members from Linguistics, Spanish, Communication Disorders and the 5-college community. However, anyone who shares these interests is very welcome.  We encourage especially presentations about planned experiments so that people—especially students–can benefit from group brainstorming.

Our last meetings last Fall were online and internationally organized with contributors from not only the 5-colleges, but also Canada, Germany and Brazil and attendees from England, Holland, Romania and elsewhere.    While online connections are welcome (and often important) sources of discussion, we want to return essentially to the in-person format.

We would like to begin with a return to a more local focus and an emphasis on some basics of modern research challenges:  How experimental scenarios are developed and extensions into online experimentation, online questionnaires, and how to search various corpora (Childes, Wang Browser, etc.).   In addition, new adult populations, fieldwork environments, and the ever-changing social challenges linked to languages inevitably become involved.   First meeting:

Sept 16 Friday at 11:30 Room 451, ILC (UMass)

We will discuss plans and schedule individual proposals, and begin with  a first presentation on acquisition of recursion in Chinese by Bing Bai from Seechow University who has been a visitor to LARC over the past year.  He will present his experimentation in Mandarin Chinese on relative clauses and possessives (in L1 and L2) titled:

       Bing Bai:  The trigger information in recursive DPs

We would be glad to hear from any of you if you have questions or suggestions.

Florence Sullivan: In memoriam

It was with great sadness that we in the Cognitive Science community learned of Florence Sullivan’s passing this summer. She was a source of great energy and great expertise in bridges between education and cognitive science. Sullivan was a member of the CogSci Initiative steering committee from its inception, and presented at our third annual workshop in 2017. Follow this link to read the tribute to her in the University News.

Allen in CICS, Thursday 11/19 at 12:00

Thursday, November 19, 2020 – 12:00 Kelsey Allen (MIT): Robotics

I am currently a PhD candidate under the supervision of Josh Tenenbaum in the Computational Cognitive Science group. Previously I was an intern at DeepMind, and received my B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia in Physics.

Thursday, November 19, 2020 – 12:00 Kelsey Allen (MIT): Robotics

Bio: I am currently a PhD candidate under the supervision of Josh Tenenbaum in the Computational Cognitive Science group. Previously I was an intern at DeepMind, and received my B.Sc. from the University of British Columbia in Physics.

About

The Machine Learning and Friends Lunch (MLFL) series is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Labs.

MLFL is a lively and interactive forum held weekly where friends of the UMass Amherst machine learning community can gather virtually and give or hear a 50-minute presentation on recent machine learning research.

What is it?   A gathering of students/faculty/staff with broad interest in the methods and applications of machine learning.
When is it?    Thursdays 12:00pm to 1:00pm, via Zoom
Who is invited?   Everyone is welcome.
More info? Email cds-info@cs.umass.edu with questions or suggestions.

Gaston in Cognitive Brownbag, Wednesday, Nov 18 at noon

The final cognitive brownbag is today and it’s Phoebe Gaston (UMD PhD, presently UConn). The talk will begin at 12:00, at the following Zoom room:

https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/97489074821?pwd=MG9Nbk9OS1g4N3RXMVZab3duQUtSQT09

Meeting ID: 974 8907 4821
Passcode: PBScog

The role of syntactic prediction in auditory word recognition
Sentence context is understood to play some role in the processing of bottom-up acoustic input during word recognition, but the nature of this influence is both unclear and controversial. In this talk, I will focus on the mechanism by which expectations for the syntactic category of an upcoming word are integrated with the auditory input that allows that word to be recognized. One possibility is that syntactic predictions could completely inhibit contextually inappropriate lexical candidates, but an alternative considered less often is that the category prediction instead facilitates items that match its constraints, without affecting items that don’t. I will argue that failure to account for how these two possibilities would manifest differently in dependent measures may help explain conflict in the literature on this question. I will then present our high-powered experiment in the visual world paradigm, specifically designed to distinguish between an inhibitory and a facilitatory mechanism for the category constraint. We found that wrong-category lexical candidates do demonstrate phonological competition, ruling out complete inhibition as the mechanism for the syntactic category constraint. Finally, turning to the nature of syntactic category predictions themselves as an important angle on the problem of the syntactic constraint, I will present a MEG study on the generation of syntactic predictions and the difficulty of disentangling lexical and syntactic prediction.

De-Arteaga in CICS, Thursday, November 12, at 11:00am

Thursday, November 12, 2020 – 11:00 Maria De-Arteaga (UT Austin): Human-Centered Machine Learning

Bio: I am an Assistant Professor at the Information, Risk and Operation Management Department at McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. I am also a core faculty member in the interdepartmental Machine Learning Laboratory.

About

The Machine Learning and Friends Lunch (MLFL) series is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Labs.

MLFL is a lively and interactive forum held weekly where friends of the UMass Amherst machine learning community can gather virtually and give or hear a 50-minute presentation on recent machine learning research.

What is it?   A gathering of students/faculty/staff with broad interest in the methods and applications of machine learning.
When is it?    Thursdays 12:00pm to 1:00pm, via Zoom
Who is invited?   Everyone is welcome.
More info? Email cds-info@cs.umass.edu with questions or suggestions.