Language Evolution, Acquisition, and Processing (LEAP) is a workshop at the University of Chicago, funded by the Council on Advanced Studies.
Schedule: Winter Quarter 2024
- Unless otherwise noted, LEAP will take place on select Fridays from 11 am to 12:20 pm in person in Wieboldt Hall 130 and on Zoom.
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Talk Details
07 February – Claire Bergey (Postdoctoral Scholar, Linguistics/Social Interaction Lab, Stanford University)
Title: Language learning and use in conversation
Abstract: How should conversation shape our understanding of language learning and use? In this talk, I will present ongoing work on three corpora of naturalistic conversation: conversations among adults, conversations between parents and children, and conversations among children. Despite often seeming like meandering talk, casual conversations have systematic structure. Introducing a new dataset of topic annotations on conversations between adult strangers, I will show that conversation has a nested structure of increasing specificity: dyads start in similar parts of semantic space and gradually explore more idiosyncratic content as conversations progress. Next, examining conversations between parents and children, I will characterize how children expand their repertoires of communicative acts over development, learning to effect varied communicative purposes. Knowledge of these communicative acts predicts knowledge of other language structure, such as vocabulary and syntactic frames. Finally, introducing a dataset of conversations among children at preschool, I will examine how children shape their language input through their own choice of communicative partners. In sum, I argue that we can only make sense of language and its development through its site of use: conversation.
14 February – Austin German (Postdoctoral Fellow, Linguistics, UChicago)
Title: Coming soon!
Abstract: Coming soon!
21 February – Jeffery Davis (PhD student, Linguistics, UChicago)
Title: Coming soon!
Abstract: Coming soon!
28 February – Chunan Li (PhD student, Linguistics, UChicago)
Title: Coming soon!
Abstract: Coming soon!
About LEAP
Language evolution, acquisition, and processing are research topics of great interest to language researchers. The LEAP workshop brings together students and faculty from Linguistics, Psychology, Comparative Human Development, Neuroscience, Computer Science and other fields to foster a unique interdisciplinary perspective. We aim not only to familiarize students with the wealth of language research at the University, but also to allow students to receive feedback from faculty in different disciplines and to foster collaboration among language researchers from different fields.
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Head to this link to sign up for the LEAP mailing list.
Contact Us
Please feel free to get in touch if you are interested in getting involved! LEAP’s student coordinators for 2024-25 are Yuchen Jin (Comparative Human Development and Psychology, yuchenjin[at]uchicago[dot]edu), Parker Robbins (Linguistics, probbins[at]uchicago[dot]edu). LEAP’s faculty sponsors for 2024-25 are: Ming Xiang (Linguistics) and Monica Do (Linguistics).