harvard library with trees in the foregound

Language & Cognition (LangCog)

Language Development Lab (SnedLab)  & Meaning and Modality Lab

Tuesdays, 5:30 – 7:00 pm ET in William James Hall 1550 (Harvard University)

Organizers: Hayley Ross (hayleyross@g.harvard.edu), Genia Lukin (elukin@g.harvard.edu)

Upcoming Talks:

Full Schedule Spring 2024:

DatePresenterLocationTalk Title
1/23NO TALK – First week of classes
1/30Panel (Kate Davidson, Meredith Rowe, Jesse Snedeker)WJH 1550Collaboration across Language Sciences
2/6Brian Dillon (UMass Amherst)WJH 1550Evaluating expectation-based comprehension with the Syntactic Ambiguity Processing benchmark
2/13NO TALK – Cancelled due to snow
2/20 Elena Marx (Harvard / CEU)WJH 1550Mapping event structure onto temporal structure during language comprehension
2/27Jonathan Peelle (Northeastern)WJH 1550Cognitive consequences of acoustic challenge during spoken communication
3/5J Cooper Roberts (MIT)WJH 1550Cleverly asking questions stupidly: on the apparent disappearance of “high” adverbs in certain syntactic environments
3/12  NO TALK – Spring break
3/19Yuhan Zhang (Harvard)WJH 1550Understanding language illusions
3/26 Akshita Srinivasan (Harvard)WJH 1550Does language shape children’s understanding of numerical concepts?
4/2Samer Nour Eddine (Tufts)WJH 1550Dynamic duo: Insights from a dual-unit predictive coding model of lexico-semantic processing
4/9Halie Olson (MIT)WJH 1550Language in the developing mind and brain
4/16 Peng Qian (Harvard / MIT)WJH 1550The Cognitive Basis of Flexible Communication: Two Case Studies
4/23Amir Anvari (MIT)WJH 1050On the subject matter of formal semantics

Full Schedule Fall 2023:

DatePresenterLocationTalk Title
9/12Meet & Greet PicnicWJH Courtyard
9/19Naomi Caselli (BU)WJH 1550How does sign language experience shape language acquisition for deaf children? 
9/26Jon Rawski (MIT / San Jose State University)WJH 1550Rethinking Poverty of the Stimulus
10/3 Stephan Meylan (MIT)WJH 1350A discourse-first model of early child language learning
10/10Elsi Kaiser (USC)WJH 1550Talking about people: Pronoun interpretation, (last) names and gender bias
10/17 Shannon Bryant (Rutgers)WJH 1550Beyond binding conditions: Pronoun choice in English and Mandarin prepositional phrases
10/24  Gabor Brody (Brown)WJH 1550What do descriptions describe?
10/31NO TALK – Hallowe’enWJH 1550
11/7 Albert Webson (Brown / Google DeepMind)WJH 1550Comparing the Instruction Following Behaviors of Language Models and Humans
11/14Maggie Kandel (Harvard)WJH 1550Agreement attraction in pronoun production
11/21NO TALK – Happy Thanksgiving!WJH 1550
11/28   Felix Kpogo (BU)WJH 1550Differential cue use in the production of complex–simplex stop contrasts: A developmental perspective from Gã
12/5     Jennifer Hu (Harvard) WJH 1550Using artificial language models to test linguistic theories: Case studies and caveats