Language - Intro to Cognitive Science: Cognitive Modeling - Fall 2009

Contents

Slides

Overview of Today's Class [1/8, 2009/09/17]

• Rubrics
• Leftovers from last time?
• Language acquisition video
• Language
• Verb inflection
• Project 1

Related to last week's discussion [2/8, 2009/09/17]

• Any lingering questions?

Language acquisition video [3/8, 2009/09/17]

Your questions/issues on readings [4/8, 2009/09/17]

Give me your top two questions/issues that remained unanswered for you or whose answers you found most interesting.

Then we'll discuss them.

My important concepts [5/8, 2009/09/17]

• Modularity
• Human uniqueness (wrt language)
• Dissociations
• Learning, maturation (changes in brain)
• VP, NP, SOV, VSO, case, agglutinative
• Positive, negative evidence
• Prosody
• Bootstrapping
• UG and parameters

Verb inflection [6/8, 2009/09/17]

Three part exercise

1. 30 seconds: Write down as many verbs as you can
2. 20 seconds: Write down their past tense forms
3. 3 minutes working with a partner, try to think up some rules / program / algorithm for forming the past tense from the present tense

Discussion: How many are handled by your rules? How many not?

Project 1 [7/8, 2009/09/17]

Partner assignment

Description here and link on the course homepage as well.

Revisions

• For any project, can resubmit to get up to 3/4 of "missed" points.
• Must submit "tracking changes" version which clearly shows revisions to the original.

For next time: [8/8, 2009/09/17]

Meet in the LAB, 1307 Lewis

• We'll discuss this paper a bit more
• Try to make a start on the project before then.
• Bring a list of verbs,
• categorized into regular and different groups of irregulars.
• Try to identify regularities.
• One verb-list per group.
• Around 40-50 verbs is ideal.
• Bring one copy of your verb list to hand in (as part of your project grade), one to keep.