Note that this week's meeting of the Semantics Research Group is cancelled.
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Research Group
Guest speaker: Suzanne Robillard (University of Ottawa): "Implicit norms and prestige forms: Linguistic cohesion of G2 French in Victoria."
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Ewan Dunbar (faculty, Department of French): "Modelling early language acquisition from raw speech data."
The problem of language acquisition is key to the way questions are posed and answered in linguistics and in the cognitive sciences of language more broadly. And we now know quite a lot about the earliest stages of language acquisition, which, logically, show infants tuning into the signal, learning the sound inventory of the language and developing a small early lexicon between six and twelve months. What can recent advances in machine learning bring to the table? I will discuss how we have been able to take advantage of an interest from industry in applied problems in speech recognition, and channel the forces of modern machine learning towards cognitively interesting problems in early language acquisition. I will cover the small number of initial results that seem to come out of this line of research, which suggest that abstract phonet/emic categories are both critically important and somewhat overrated, depending on what facts need to be explained.
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