Cog Sci Speaker Series: How Context and Competition Constrain Language Production
Presenter: Dr. Cassandra Jacobs
Title: How Context and Competition Constrain Language Production
Abstract: Successful language production requires the coordination of many cognitive systems, from individual memories of linguistic events and knowledge of linguistic statistics, to engaging the motor system to produce an utterance. In this talk, I will illustrate the rich sensitivity of the language production system to short- and long-term experience, to context, and to the presence of other alternatives, drawing on both large-scale analyses of behavioral datasets and laboratory experiments. I will show how the statistical properties of language shape the choices we make (Jacobs et al., 2016; Jacobs et al., 2017; Jacobs et al., 2024), how sentence contexts drive our word choice (Jacobs & MacDonald, 2023), and how word choice and production fluency depend on the other words that might be said (Mankewitz et al., 2024 AMLaP; Jacobs et al., 2024). At the end of the talk, I will highlight the need for tractable cognitive models of language production and ways that a novel Bayesian model of lexical retrieval can bring us closer to this goal.
Bio: Dr. Cassandra Jacobs is an Assistant Professor at the University at Buffalo where they direct the Computational Linguistics and Cognition (CaLiCo) Lab. Their work uses computational modeling techniques building on natural language processing combined with behavioral experimentation to better understand human language processing, especially the processes of producing and comprehending words in sentences.
Event Snapshot
When and Where
Who
Open to the Public
| Cost | FREE |
Interpreter Requested?
Yes