There looks to be lots of really interesting work being presented at CogSci2013 in Berlin this weekend.

Our lab is being represented by Sarah Wilson (a former Berkeley PhD student), who is presenting on Friday, August 2, at 4:30 pm, in the Language Acquisition 1 session.

“Acquisition of phrase structure in an artificial visual grammar”. As promised, we doubled the data, so the talk will be a little different than the proceedings paper.

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As promised, more information about a tweet:
Lab Alum Sarah Wilson will be presenting “Acquisition of Phrase Structure in an Artificial Visual Grammar” at the CogSci 2013 in Berlin this summer.

Here’s the abstract:
Recent studies showing learners can induce phrase structure from distributional patterns (Thompson & Newport, 2007; Saffran, 2001) suggest that phrase structure need not be innate. Here, we ask if this learning ability is restricted to language. Specifically, we ask if phrase structure can be induced from non-linguistic visual arrays and further, whether learning is assisted by abstract category information. In an artificial visual grammar paradigm where co-occurrence relationships exist between categories of objects rather than individual items, participants preferred phrase-relevant pairs over frequency-matched non-phrase pairs. Additionally, participants generalized phrasal relationships to novel pairs, but only in the cued condition. Taken together these results show that learners can acquire phrase structure in a non-linguistic system, and that cues improve learning.

The plan is to collect some more data for this project over the summer too, so stay tuned for more updates.

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