{"id":10881,"date":"2018-03-01T10:02:12","date_gmt":"2018-03-01T14:02:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/whamit.mit.edu\/?p=10881"},"modified":"2018-03-01T11:02:47","modified_gmt":"2018-03-01T15:02:47","slug":"linglunch-31-richard-futrell-mit-bcs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/2018\/03\/01\/linglunch-31-richard-futrell-mit-bcs\/","title":{"rendered":"CANCELLED DUE TO ILLNESS \/ LingLunch 3\/1: Richard Futrell (MIT-BCS)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Speaker:\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/web.mit.edu\/futrell\/www\/\">Richard Futrell<\/a> (MIT-BCS)\u00a0<br clear='none'\/>\n <strong>Title:<\/strong> Memory and Locality in Natural Language<br clear='none'\/>\n <strong>Date and time:<\/strong> Thursday, March 1, 12:30-1:50pm<br clear='none'\/>\n <strong>Location:<\/strong> 32-D461<br clear='none'\/>\n <strong>Abstract:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>I explore the hypothesis that the universal properties of human languages can be explained in terms of efficient communication given fixed human information processing constraints. First, I show corpus evidence from 54 languages that word order in grammar and usage is shaped by working memory constraints in the form of dependency locality: a pressure for syntactically linked words to be close to one another in linear order. Next, I develop a new theory of human language processing cost, based on rational inference in a noisy channel, that unifies surprisal and memory effects and goes beyond dependency locality to a new principle of information locality: that words that predict each other should be close. I show corpus evidence for information locality. Finally, I show that the new processing model resolves a long-standing paradox in the psycholinguistic literature, structural forgetting, where the effects of memory on language processing appear to be language-dependent.\n <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Speaker:\u00a0Richard Futrell (MIT-BCS)\u00a0 Title: Memory and Locality in Natural Language Date and time: Thursday, March 1, 12:30-1:50pm Location: 32-D461 Abstract:\u00a0 I explore the hypothesis that the universal properties of human languages can be explained in terms of efficient communication given fixed human information processing constraints. First, I show corpus evidence from 54 languages that word [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-announcements"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10881"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10881\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10888,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10881\/revisions\/10888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ling-phil.mit.edu\/whamit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}