All are welcome at the final CLC event this spring: Richard Futrell (MIT, BCS) will speak at Psycholinguistics Workshop on Friday, April 27th, 10am-11am, in ILC N400. Richard will also be available for individual meetings – please contact Chris Hammerly to set up an appointment. See below for abstract and title.

Memory and Locality in Natural Language

April 27th (Fri), 10am-11am, ILC N400 (Psycholing Workshop)

I explore the hypothesis that the universal properties of human languages can be explained in terms of efficient communication given fixed human information processing constraints. First, I show corpus evidence from 54 languages that word order in grammar and usage is shaped by working memory constraints in the form of dependency locality: a pressure for syntactically linked words to be close to one another in linear order. Next, I develop a new theory of human language processing cost, based on rational inference in a noisy channel, that unifies surprisal and memory effects and goes beyond dependency locality to a new principle of information locality: that words that predict each other should be close. I show corpus evidence for information locality. Finally, I show that the new processing model resolves a long-standing paradox in the psycholinguistic literature, structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on language processing appear to be language-dependent.