Franklin Chang, March 20

Linking acquisition, production, and comprehension

Franklin Chang
School of Psychology, University of Liverpool

One goal in the psychology of language is the development of unified theory of language acquisition, production, and comprehension.  Toward this goal, I will present a connectionist model of sentence-level processing.  The model incorporates an implicit learning mechanism that acquires abstract syntactic representations and these representations allow the model to capture a wide range of structural priming phenomena (Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006).  These learning mechanisms are powerful enough to allow the model to learn English and Japanese representations, and to explain different incremental production biases in these languages (Chang, 2009).  Finally, I will discuss a new version of this model, which incorporates spatial representations (e.g., object files, affordances) and these additions allow the model to account for visual world eye-tracking results in sentence comprehension.  By linking language with implicit learning and spatial representations, it is possible to give a unified account of language development and language processing.

Where and when:

15:45-17:00 Mar 20, 2012

MPI Nijmegen, Rm 163