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Back to the future: linguistic emergence in usage and the psychological mechanism of learning

In this talk, Petar Milin will present work as part of the Out of our Minds team [https://outofourminds.bham.ac.uk/]. This group operationalizes the usage-based linguistic notion of emergence from use through psychological principles of learning. He will pay special attention to the hybrid methodology we are developing and using, which combines corpus analysis, computational modelling, and experimentation.

The presentation will investigate how corpus analysis and computational modelling of learning can constrain one another to provide insights for both, the necessary and sufficient linguistic abstractions as well as the necessary and sufficient learning functionality, to meet the requirement of cognitive commitment and plausibility that is finally tested in the lab.

The project is in harmony with Poggio’s (2012) addition to Marr’s (1982) three level of analysis, in which learning represents a self-sufficient level of explanation, and where the dynamic pressure of language-in-use constrains what emerges and how it gets learned.

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