Mellon Workshop in the Humanities

"Language and the Mind" (2001-2003)

Workshop Background:

Language lies at the core of human creativity and reflection. We acquire our native language with ease, we produce sentences that nobody has heard before, we handle language masterfully and creatively—but do we know how it works? The purpose of the "Language and the Mind" workshop series was to promote collaboration and discussion among faculty, students, and everyone else who is interested in how human language is structured, acquired, and put to use.
Over two academic years (2001-2003), "Language and the Mind" brought together students and faculty from Linguistics, Psychology, Communicative Disorders, Language Departments, and Philosophy in monthly meetings (average number of participants: 30-35), some of which focused on the discussion of articles, while others featured external speakers or leading researchers from UW Madison.

The workshop was sponsored by the UW Center for the Humanities and funded by two grants from the Mellon Foundation .
Our thanks to everybody who supported the workshop and helped making it a continuing success.

Organizing Group:

Hassan Belhiah (English)
Julia Evans (Communicative Disorders)
Ray Kent ( Communicative Disorders)
Yafei Li (Linguistics)
Mark Louden (German)
Jenny Saffran (Psychology)
Anja Wanner (English), Coordinator

Chronology of Workshop Events

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 2 (Oct. 26, 2001): Topics in First and Second Language Acquisition

Discussion topics for the second meeting included:

maturational factors: evidence for a "critical" or "sensitive" period for language acquisition
how does the grammar of the first language influence the acquisition of a second language

Readings:

(a) William Ritchie/Tej Bhatia "Second Language Acquisition: Introduction, Foundations, and Overview", In: Ritchie/Bhatia (eds. 1997): Handbook of Second Language Acquisition . San Diego: Academic Press. pp. 1-36.

(b) Elissa Newport (1990): "Maturational Constraints on Language Learning". Cognitive Science 14, pp. 11-28.

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 3 (Nov. 30, 2001): Language Acquisition and Processing under Specific Impairments

Our third meeting took place at the Waisman Center. Workshop members had the opportunity to visit two research labs; the second part ot the meeting was a discussion session, moderated by faculty members from Communicative Disorders.
The following labs were open for visitors:
(a) Jenny Saffran's lab (Room 501): Infant speech perception, tour led by Erik Thiessen
(b) Susan Ellis Weismer et al. (Room 443): Children's language disorders, tour led by Susan Ellis Weismer
(c) Room 290: X-ray microbeam lab (Room 290), tour led by Paul Milenkovic

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 4 (Dec. 14, 2001): Language Development and Change

Our fourth meeting was anchored by a guest lecturer.
David Lightfoot (Professor of Linguistics, Georgetown University) gave a presentation on:
"Contingency and Necessity in Language Change"
Readings: David Lightfoot: Language Development: Acquisition, Change and Evolution. Blackwell, 1999. (Chapters 8+10)

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 5 (Feb. 15, 2002): Issues in the Philosophy of Language

Our fifth meeting was moderated and introduced by Antonio Rauti (UW Madison, Philosophy).
G. Frege (1892): On Sense and Nominatum (excerpt)
H. Putnam (1973): "Meaning and Reference"
H. Wettstein (1988): "Cognitive Significance without Cognitive Content".

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 6 (March 6, 2002) : Words and Rules

Steven Pinker , Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT,
was scheduled to give a lecture on "Words and Rules".Due to a flight delay, Steven Pinker's afternoon lecture had to be cancelled. Instead, he met for breakfast with workshop members on March 8th to talk about his MIT twin-study project related to his theory of "Words and Rules". He also gave a lecture in the "Humanities without Boundaries" series, entitled "The Bland Slate".

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 7 (April 5, 2002): Directions in Linguistic Theory

Ray Jackendoff , Professor of Linguistics at Brandeis University, gave a lecture entitled
"Reintegrating Linguistic Theory"
He also gave a lecture on the evolution of language, sponsored by the University Lecture Committee.

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 8 (April 12, 2002): Gestures

David McNeill (Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Linguistics, University of Chicago) gave a talk on "Gesture and Language Dialectic".

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 9 (May 3, 2002): Cognitive Linguistic

Our final speaker in the first year of L+M was Adele Goldberg (UIUC), who gave a talk on : "Constructing Meaning"

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 10 (Sep. 27, 2002): Animal Communication

Chuck Snowdon , Hilldale Professor of Psychology and Zoology at UW Madison,
gave a talk on cognition and social behavior of primates: "Social Processes in the Evolution of Complex Cognition and Communication".

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 11 (Nov. 1, 2002): Speech production

Ben Munson (University of Minnesota) gave a talk about speech production, with emphasis on children with language impairments: The Influence of Lexical and Phonological Processing on Speech Production in Children and Adults
This talk reviewed past and current research in Ben's laboratory aimed at understanding the factors that influence speech production in adults, typically developing children, and children with speech and language disorders. In particular, this talk focuses on recent studies aimed at understanding the different influences that lexical processing (lexical access, lexical organization, and lexical representation) and phonological processing (phonological organization, phonological representation, and speech-motor planning) have on the accuracy, latency, duration, and flexibility of speech production.

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 12 (Dec. 6, 2002): Language and Visual Cognition

Gerry Altmann (University of York): Mediating the mapping between language and the visual world
The goal of much psycholinguistic research is to understand the processes by which linguistic input is mapped onto a hearer's mental representation of his or her world. Within the context of a sentence such as the mouse chased the cat into the basket , we can ask questions such as "At what stage is the cat interpreted as the thing being chased?", "At what stage do we determine which cat?", and more generally, "How and when do we map the components of a sentence onto components of the world?" Recent findings have suggested that one promising avenue for understanding such processes, and their time-course, is to monitor eye-movements around a visual scene as a hearer listens to a description of what may happen next in the scenario depicted by the scene. I shall review a number of studies which explore the mapping, and its time-course, of sentences onto the visual world. These show that aspects of the language make contact with the visual world at the theoretically earliest opportunity; that language is mapped not onto the visual world in these studies but onto a mental world (eye movements are directed to where objects had been located, rather than where they are located); and that the processor is able to use information about what has been heard so far, in conjunction with the visual context and real-world knowledge, to anticipate what will be referred to next in the linguistic input. I shall conclude that the interpretation of a sentence situated in a visual world may be as much to do with non-linguistic, primarily visually driven processes, as with linguistic processes. This is to be expected on the view that ontologically, such processes most likely precede the linguistic processes that we typically assume "drive" the mapping between language and the world.

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 13 (Feb. 21, 2003): Sign Language

Ann Senghas (Barnard College): From Gestures to Grammar: How Children are Creating Nicaraguan Sign Language
Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) appeared only two decades ago among deaf children and adolescents attending new schools for special education in Managua, Nicaragua. The children's initial language environment provided severely degraded and incomplete linguistic input: they could not hear the Spanish spoken around them, and there was no previously developed sign language available. These learners responded by producing a gestural system with regularities that did not exist in their input, and in the process created a new, natural sign language. The language continues to develop and change as new cohorts of children enter school yearly and learn to sign among older peers. Consequently, there is a measurable discrepancy between the input to which each cohort of new arrivals is exposed and the language that they ultimately acquire. This discrepancy reveals a creative component of language learning.
By systematically comparing each cohort to the one that preceded it, we can detect new developments in areas central to the grammar of this emerging language. In this way, we can examine how grammatical systems develop; in particular, whether they are a product of certain tendencies of child learners. A series of comparisons reveals that the younger, more recent signers make use of emerging morphological devices in ways that the older signers who served as their language models do not. In this talk, we will view and discuss video examples of signing exhibiting spatial morphology. I will argue that these morphological devices have recently emerged to perform two functions: linking verbs with their arguments, and indicating location and orientation information. By examining these devices, we see that recent learners have reanalyzed and differentiated particular types of spatial movements, movements that are undifferentiated in the signing of the older children they learned from. Thus, by acquiring their language, these children are creating it.

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 14 (April 11, 2003) : Language Development

Annette Karmiloff-Smith , Head of the Neurocognitive Development Unit at the Institute of Child Health, University College London, gave a talk on cognitive development in children and adults with specific genetic disorders (Williams Syndrome):
Genotype/Phenotype Relations: Why a Cognitive Developmental Perspective Is Essential

Abstract: I will discuss five approaches to genotype/phenotype relations, showing how such mapping is not straight-forward even in a genetic disorder where the deleted genes and the pattern of behavioral impairments have already been identified. The case of Williams syndrome (WS) serves as a model. Genotype/phenotype relations will be explored with respect to computational modelling, mouse models, older children and adults with WS, compared to non-WS individuals with similar but smaller deletions on chromosome 7q11.23, and the infant phenotype. I shall ask what we mean by "scores within the normal range" and argue that it is at the level of underlying cognitive processes, and not behavioral outcomes, that genotype/phenotype relations must be explored. Our studies indicate that the patterns found in the phenotypic outcome of two syndromes (Williams and Down) do not allow the researcher simply to assume that the same patterns obtain in infancy. These same arguments hold even for syndromes with a single gene mutation such as FragileX syndrome. Thus, if we are ultimately to map genotype to cognitive phenotype, consideration of the infant start state, the entire developmental trajectory and the underlying cognitive processes is essential.

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 15 (April 22, 2003): Words and Rules Revisited

Richard Wiese (Professor of German Linguistics, University of Marburg): "The Debate about Regular and Irregular Morphology in German: More Psycholinguistic Evidence"

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 16 (April 25, 2003) : Gestures Revisited

Eve Sweetser (Professor of Linguistics, UC Berkeley) gave a talk on: Metaphors and Gesture
This was a joint talk for "Language and the Mind" and the Mellon workshop "Metaphor: Language, Thought, Art"

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 17 (May 2, 2003): Language Processing Revisited

Mike Tanenhaus (Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Linguistics, Rochester):
Circumscribing referential domains: bridging the language-as-product and language-as-action traditions
Definite referring expressions, such as “the upcoming colloquium” assume a uniquely identifiable referent within a relevant context or domain. I will review recent work from my laboratory that uses eye movements in relatively natural tasks to investigate how listeners circumscribe referential domains as an utterance unfolds. These studies demonstrate that factors widely viewed as relevant to defining referential domains within the “language-as-action” tradition influence the earliest moments of reference resolution. These factors include: salient visual context, goal-specific properties of specific objects, e.g. size and state (liquid or solid), and the listener’s knowledge of the speaker’s perspective, even when it conflict with his or her own immediate perceptual experience. I’ll highlight the theoretical and methodological implications of this work, and if time allows, illustrate how it is possible to study moment-by-moment language comprehension in fully interactive, non-scripted conversation.

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------

Meeting 18 (May 9, 2002): Language Acquisition Revisited

In our final meeting, Mark Seidenberg (Professor of Psychology and the Neuroscience Training Program at UW Madison) lead a discussion on: Statistical and grammatical mechanisms in learning language: Discussion of an on-going debate.
We will be discussing ongoing controversies about the bases of language acquisition, specifically whether language learning involves distinct statistical and grammatical mechanisms. Discussions of language acquisition have relied heavily on "poverty of the stimulus" arguments which suggest that languages could not be learned under the conditions characteristic of the child's early experience without significant innate biological knowledge ("universal grammar"). There is now clear evidence that children's learning capacities are somewhat different than assumed by the POS argument; in particular children are exceedingly good statistical learners. The question that then arises is how much of the structure and acquisition of language can be explained in terms of this capacity, which is not language specific.
After the appearance of early statistical learning papers such as Saffran et al.'s (1996), a number of researchers attempted to provide evidence for nonstatistical learning mechanisms in young children. Statistical learning, on this view, is relevant to learning some aspects of language (e.g., phonology, the lexicon, perhaps language-specific parameters) but not grammatical knowledge. This debate is ongoing and one of the more important developments in the study of child language in recent years.

----------------------------------------Back to top----------------------------------------