The next psychology colloquium is scheduled for next Wednesday March 24th at 3:30pm via Zoom. Dr.Victor Ferreira from the Psychology Department of University of California, San Diego will be presenting his work titled “Syntactic Entrainment as a Candidate Mechanism for Learning the Meanings of Syntactic Structures.” We hope that you will join us!
Dr.Ferreira agreed to be available for meetings from 2:30pm-3:15pm on the day of the talk, March 24th. If you are interested in meeting with Dr.Ferreira, please sign up HERE by March 22nd. More information will be provided upon sign-up.
Abstract: In natural language, syntactic structures not only determine permissible linguistic patterns and convey who did what to whom; they can also convey aspects of event meaning. For example, in English, one explanation for why “the man sent the address the letter” sounds odd (compared to “the man sent the woman the letter”) is that the relevant syntactic structure, the double object, conveys successful transfer of possession (and whereas women can take possession of letters, addresses generally cannot). In this talk, I describe a series of experiments investigating a possible mechanism by which such meanings might be learned and tuned. Experimenters and subjects described sets of twelve scenes to one another. Rounds began with the experimenter describing each scene using particular syntactic structures (e.g., “the man is giving the doctor a prescription” vs “the man is giving the prescription to the doctor"), manipulated across subjects and scenes. Subjects then described the same scenes back. Results showed that when subjects described scenes, they repeated the same structures they heard experimenters use for that scene (up to 21 trials earlier), an effect we term "syntactic entrainment." Follow-up experiments assessed aspects of this effect relevant to its hypothetical role in learning meaning. Taken together, the experiments show that the nature of syntactic entrainment positions it well as a possible explanation for how syntactic structures get and tune their meanings.
Event link for attendees:
https://zoom.us/j/99433621263?pwd=N0hPaUQ3V3o5cHVYaEo0TWJHRkk5dz09
Meeting ID: 994 3362 1263
Passcode: 20210324
The remaining colloquium scheduled is listed below. All talks will take place online at 3:30pm on Wednesdays unless otherwise noted.
March 31st 2021
Dr. Sandra Waxman
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University
April 21st, 2021
Dr. Sapna Cheryan
Department of Psychology, University of Washington
April 28th 2021
Dr. Brandy Simula
Georgia Institute of Technology
Invited by Science of Learning & Art of Communication (SLAC)
For more information, contact: Merrisa Lin at merrisa.lin@uconn.edu