Language & Cognition (LangCog)
Psychology Language Development Labs (Snedeker Lab & Bergelson Lab), Meaning and Modality Lab (Davidson Lab)
Tuesdays, 5:30 – 7:00 pm ET in William James Hall 1550 (Harvard University)
Organizers: Genia Lukin (elukin@g.harvard.edu), Nayantara Das (nayantaradas@g.harvard.edu)
Schedule Fall 2024:
| Date | Presenter | Location | Talk Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9/3 | NO TALK – First week of classes | | |
| 9/10 | Meet and Greet Picnic | WJH Courtyard | |
| 9/17 | Valerio Pepe (Harvard) | WJH 1550 | Loose LIPS Sink Ships: Asking Questions in Battleship with Language-Informed Program Sampling |
| 9/24 | Aditya Yedetore (BU) | WJH 1550 | Semantic training signals promote hierarchical syntactic generalization in neural networks |
| 10/1 | Najoung Kim (BU) | WJH 1550 | Generating novel experimental hypotheses from language models: A case study on cross-dative generalization |
| 10/8 | Hayley Ross (Harvard) | WJH 1550 | When is artificial intelligence still intelligence? Measuring and modelling adjective-noun inferences |
| 10/15 | Simge Topaloglu (Harvard) | WJH 1550 | Number Sense and Number Nonsense: Children’s Understanding of the Structure of Number Words |
| 10/22 | Roman Feiman (Brown) | WJH 1550 | Distinguishing children’s concepts from non-conceptual representations: The case study of possibility representations |
| 10/29 | Ezer Rasin (MIT/Tel Aviv) | WJH 1550 | How children learn the hidden sound patterns of their language: a computational approach |
| 11/5 | Wataru Uegaki (University of Edinburgh) | WJH 1550 | Lexicalization, compositionality, and communicative efficiency: The case of deontic priority |
| 11/12 | Erin Campbell (BU) | WJH 1550 | Form-Meaning Systematicity in the ASL lexicon |
| 11/19 | Adele Mortier (MIT) | WJH 1550 | How do Large Language Models process scalar Hurford Disjunctions? |
| 11/26 | Thanksgiving Break | WJH 1550 | |
| 12/03 | Patrick Juola (Duquesne University) | WJH 1550 |
Full Schedule Spring 2024:
| Date | Presenter | Location | Talk Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1/23 | NO TALK – First week of classes | ||
| 1/30 | Panel (Kate Davidson, Meredith Rowe, Jesse Snedeker) | WJH 1550 | Collaboration across Language Sciences |
| 2/6 | Brian Dillon (UMass Amherst) | WJH 1550 | Evaluating expectation-based comprehension with the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing benchmark |
| 2/13 | NO TALK – Cancelled due to snow | ||
| 2/20 | Elena Marx (Harvard / CEU) | WJH 1550 | Mapping event structure onto temporal structure during language comprehension |
| 2/27 | Jonathan Peelle (Northeastern) | WJH 1550 | Cognitive consequences of acoustic challenge during spoken communication |
| 3/5 | J Cooper Roberts (MIT) | WJH 1550 | Cleverly asking questions stupidly: on the apparent disappearance of “high” adverbs in certain syntactic environments |
| 3/12 | NO TALK – Spring break | ||
| 3/19 | Yuhan Zhang (Harvard) | WJH 1550 | Understanding language illusions |
| 3/26 | Akshita Srinivasan (Harvard) | WJH 1550 | Does language shape children’s understanding of numerical concepts? |
| 4/2 | Samer Nour Eddine (Tufts) | WJH 1550 | Dynamic duo: Insights from a dual-unit predictive coding model of lexico-semantic processing |
| 4/9 | Halie Olson (MIT) | WJH 1550 | Language in the developing mind and brain |
| 4/16 | Peng Qian (Harvard / MIT) | WJH 1550 | The Cognitive Basis of Flexible Communication: Two Case Studies |
| 4/23 | Amir Anvari (MIT) | WJH 1050 | On the subject matter of formal semantics |
Full Schedule Fall 2023:
| Date | Presenter | Location | Talk Title |
|---|---|---|---|
| 9/12 | Meet & Greet Picnic | WJH Courtyard | |
| 9/19 | Naomi Caselli (BU) | WJH 1550 | How does sign language experience shape language acquisition for deaf children? |
| 9/26 | Jon Rawski (MIT / San Jose State University) | WJH 1550 | Rethinking Poverty of the Stimulus |
| 10/3 | Stephan Meylan (MIT) | WJH 1350 | A discourse-first model of early child language learning |
| 10/10 | Elsi Kaiser (USC) | WJH 1550 | Talking about people: Pronoun interpretation, (last) names and gender bias |
| 10/17 | Shannon Bryant (Rutgers) | WJH 1550 | Beyond binding conditions: Pronoun choice in English and Mandarin prepositional phrases |
| 10/24 | Gabor Brody (Brown) | WJH 1550 | What do descriptions describe? |
| 10/31 | NO TALK – Hallowe’en | WJH 1550 | |
| 11/7 | Albert Webson (Brown / Google DeepMind) | WJH 1550 | Comparing the Instruction Following Behaviors of Language Models and Humans |
| 11/14 | Maggie Kandel (Harvard) | WJH 1550 | Agreement attraction in pronoun production |
| 11/21 | NO TALK – Happy Thanksgiving! | WJH 1550 | |
| 11/28 | Felix Kpogo (BU) | WJH 1550 | Differential cue use in the production of complex–simplex stop contrasts: A developmental perspective from Gã |
| 12/5 | Jennifer Hu (Harvard) | WJH 1550 | Using artificial language models to test linguistic theories: Case studies and caveats |