I would love to share and discuss with ABRALIN viewers some key aspects of my theoretical and applied agenda for linguistics and education in Haiti (http://linguistics.mit.edu/linguistic…). I take my native Haiti as a poster case of post-colonies where linguistic discrimination (https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/open…) keeps extracting a heavy human cost, mostly through mis-education (http://lingphil.scripts.mit.edu/paper…). My own agenda promotes […]

O ponto de partida de nossos estudos sobre o uso da língua, em situação real de comunicação, no final dos anos 1980, era a sociolinguística variacionista, com foco na busca de fatores extralinguísticos associados à ordenação vocabular. Por influência da professora Sandra Thompson, na época professora da UCLA, fizemos um estudo sobre a ordenação verbo-sujeito, […]

The role of associative learning has long been downplayed in research on language acquisition. However, the predictions of associative models are often misunderstood in the literature, and both the power and diversity of such models underestimated. For example, associative learning is often assumed to be inherently slow, or to necessarily predict that any two stimuli […]

We infer a lot from the way someone talks: personal characteristics like age, gender, background, personality; contextual characteristics like mood and attitude towards the interaction; physiological characteristics like fatigue or intoxication. Many clinical diagnostic categories have symptoms that are manifest in spoken interaction: autism spectrum disorder, neurodegenerative disorders, schizophrenia, and so on.⠀ The development of […]

This talk revisits the concept of foreigner talk register as a conventional variety of simplified language use which has been introduced by Ferguson (1981) by looking at the interactions between signers from different countries who do not know a shared sign language. The term of foreigner talk register usually is regarded by native interlocutors as […]

This talk presents an overview of the development of a model of phonotactic grammar in which well-formedness of consonant clusters is measured by NAD (Dziubalska-Kołaczyk 2014, 2019). NAD stands for a Net Auditory Distance obtaining between segments in a cluster. The auditory distance is a net reflection of the differences between segments in terms of […]

Toda situación de comunicación se define a partir de su finalidad en relación con la identidad de los sujetos que participan en el acto comunicativo. Por lo tanto, el enfoque que adoptamos para estudiar los géneros discursivos, tiene como punto de partida los parámetros del contexto situacional que determinan el modo de producción del texto […]

Em um mundo globalizado, talvez pareça não fazer muito sentido refletir sobre o conhecimento que temos produzido sobre a linguagem e as línguas do ponto de vista da sua geopolítica, sobretudo quando boa parte da Linguística do séc. XX se desenvolveu como uma ciência abstrata, formal e autônoma. Entretanto, em tempos de alta polarização como […]

In my talk I will present a general cognitive architecture of spoken language processing. This is followed by an account of how this cognitive architecture is instantiated in the human brain. Both the spatial aspects of the networks for language are discussed, as well as the temporal dynamics and the underlying neurophysiology. A distinction is […]

Linguists are often talking about evolution these days, but language structures are rarely explained by evolutionary adaptation. But in this talk, I claim that a wide range of structures (e.g. phoneme inventories, case-marking patterns, word order patterns, causative constructions, subordinate-clause constructions) can be explained as adapted to their “environments”, i.e. the needs of language users. […]