Sean Roberts

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  • February 9, 2010
  • 06:50 AM
  • 93 views

How many words for Red?

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

The distribution of colour terms on Wikipedia correlates with the human Just Noticable Difference Curve.... Read more »

Long F, Yang Z, & Purves D. (2006) Spectral statistics in natural scenes predict hue, saturation, and brightness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103(15), 6013-8. PMID: 16595630  

  • January 26, 2010
  • 04:00 AM
  • 120 views

Evolutionary Linguists announce arrival of Skynet

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

In a recent book chapter, Loreto, Baronchelli & Puglisi (2010) summarise mathematical models of language games. They minimally define a system which will allow agents to reach shared linguistic categories which describe continuous stimuli (e.g. colour). New findings include a demonstration that the number of linguistic categories will stay low, regardless of the resolution of the agents' 'eyes'. However, I was particularly struck by the last paragraph, which appears to be ominously more 6........ Read more »

Vittorio Loreto;, Andrea Baronchelli;, & Andrea Puglisi. (2009) Mathematical Modeling of Language Games. Evolution of Communication and Language in Embodied Agents, 263-281. info:/

  • January 25, 2010
  • 08:24 AM
  • 119 views

Language Structure and Social Structure

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Lupyan & Dale's recent article shows that social structure (e.g. population size) affects linguistic change. But can this dynamic be extended back in time to help think about the evolution of language?... Read more »

  • January 11, 2010
  • 09:59 AM
  • 105 views

Summary: Grassman & Tomasello (2010)

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Grassman & Tomasello (2010) question the findings of Jaswal & Hansen (2006), arguing that children primarily use pragmatic cues over linguistic conventions when trying to resolve ambiguities.... Read more »

  • January 11, 2010
  • 09:46 AM
  • 125 views

Mutual Exclusivity Diagrams

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Some diagrams of experiments into the Mutual Exclusivity bias in children's word learning.... Read more »

  • January 6, 2010
  • 10:05 AM
  • 117 views

Inferential Models of Bilingualism

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Inferential models of language learning specify how perceptual maps can be divided up to be labelled with words. However, no models currently allow bilingualism. Some proposals are made as to how to achieve this.... Read more »

DEBOER, B. (2000) Self-organization in vowel systems. Journal of Phonetics, 28(4), 441-465. DOI: 10.1006/jpho.2000.0125  

Healey, E. and Scarabela, B. (2009) Are children willing to accept two labels for one object?. Proceedings of the Child Language Seminar. University of Reading. info:/

  • December 31, 2009
  • 10:31 AM
  • 163 views

Second Language Acquisition and Memory

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

A criticism on Hagen's (2008) theory of the evolution of second language acquisition. A new model offers an alternative explanation.... Read more »

L. Kirk Hagen. (2008) The Bilingual Brain: Human Evolution and Second Language Acquisition. Evolutionary Psychology, 43-63. info:/

  • December 31, 2009
  • 10:22 AM
  • 184 views

Processing two structures simultaneously

by Sean Roberts in The Adventures of Auck

Review of Kovacs & Mehler (2009), with some data on ABA, AAB and ABB syllable structures from different languages.... Read more »

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