LING79100
Spring 2024 (GC)

Signals and Symbols
(language and other processing)
CUNY Graduate Center – Spring 2024

• Instructor: Prof. Spencer Caplan
• Meetings: Thursday 11:45-1:45, GC 7102
• Office hours: Wednesday 12:30-2:30, GC 7400.02 and by appt

Overview

Language is perhaps the best window we have into cognition. Humans' knowledge of language consists not only in grammatical representation, but in the processes which operate over such representation. Thus, how we are able to convert gradient, continuous, ephemeral perceptual signals into discrete, mental symbols (and vice versa) is of fundamental importance to work toward a fuller understanding the cognitive system of language.

This discussion-based seminar will provide a wide-ranging but in-depth overview of topics in the real-time processing of language, speech, and related perceptual domains. Special attention will be devoted to the use of simple algorithmic models and related experiments in order to explore the specific mechanisms involves in the mental representation and use of language.

Goals and Objectives

Materials

While there is no official textbook for the course, we will almost exclusively read primary papers from the relevant literature. All readings assigned throughout the term (both required and optional) will be posted to the course schedule/website.

With the goal of fostering focus, discussion, and the exchange of ideas, the use of screens (laptops, phones, etc.) will not be permitted during class. Any visual aids will be provided via physical materials (e.g. print outs) in class.

Grading

As a paper/discussion-centric seminar, the primary component of course grades (50%) will be calculated based on active participation and attendance throughout the term. As part of this effort, each student will lead paper/topic discussion in the course at least once per term (which will count towards the participation grade). This will include preparing a hand-out or discussion-aid to distribute in class.

Students will also be required to submit a short document (less than a page) each week before class with notes/reflections from the assigned readings (this will constitute 30% of the overall grade).

Finally, students will write a final term paper (consisting of a research project proposal)—the final paper will make up the remaining 20% of the grade. There will however, be no HWs quizzes or tests assigned throughout the term.

Accommodations

The instructor will attempt to provide all reasonable accommodations to students upon request. If you believe you are covered under the Americans With Disabilities Act, please direct accommodations requests to Vice President for Student Affairs Matthew G. Schoengood.

Attendance

The course takes place (in person) at the Graduate Center, and students are expected to attend all classes (in person). However, students who have reason to believe they may be contagious for COVID-19 or other infectious diseases should contact the instructor and stay home. Other absences will not be excused, and the instructor reserves the right to tie grades to attendance records.

Integrity

In line with the Student Handbook policies on plagiarism, students are expected to complete their own work. The general ethos of the integrity policy is that actions which shortcut the learning process are forbidden while actions which promote learning are encouraged. Studying and discussing notes, papers, and ideas together provides a fruitful avenue for learning and is encouraged. Using a classmate’s solution or text in your submitted notes or having someone else write a portion of your presentation, however, is prohibited because it circumvents the learning process. If you have any questions about what is or is not permissible, please contact your instructor.

The instructor reserves the right to refer violations to the Academic Integrity Officer.

Weekly Schedule

(Please note that this is subject to change.) That said, we'll plan to discuss at least some subset of: Marr's three-levels of analysis for information processing systems (Computational, Algorithmic, and Implementation), continuous vs. discrete representations in speech and vision, perception as a form of ``sampling,'' syntactic parsing/processing, categorical perception, pragmatic processing, the relationship between knowledge and perception (linguistic relativity), the time-course of spoken-word recognition, plasticity in both speech and syntactic processing, word learning, eye-movements in reading and perception; language production, ``frequency effects,'' and the influence of processing on the lexicon.

If you have a particularly strong interest in a topic not mentioned, just come talk to me and we may be able to add something in.

Week 1 (2/01) – Marr's Levels; Visual Representation of Images

Handout (Marr)

Core:
Marr, D. 1982 Vision: A computational investigation into the human representation and processing of visual information. (Ch. 1-2) MIT press.

Additional:
Quine, W.V.O. 2013 Word and object (Ch. 3) MIT press.
Quine, W.V.O. 1957 The scope and language of science. British Journal for the philosophy of Science, 8(29), 1-17.

Week 3 (2/15) Maintenance of speech information

Handout (Speech part II)

Core:
Bushong, W., & Jaeger, T. F. 2017 Maintenance of perceptual information in speech perception. Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. pg 86–191
Samuel, A. G., & Kraljic, T. 2009 Perceptual learning for speech. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. 71(6), 1207-1218.
Caplan, S., Hafri, A., & Trueswell, J. C. 2021 Now you hear me, later you don’t: The immediacy of linguistic computation and the representation of speech. Psychological Science. 32(3), 410-423.

Additional:
McMurray, B. 2022 The myth of categorical perception. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 152(6), 3819-3842.

Week 5 (2/29) Perceptual learning; What exactly are we maintaining

Handout (Intermediate Representations)

Core:
Kleinschmidt, D. F., & Jaeger, T. F. 2016 Re-examining selective adaptation: Fatiguing feature detectors, or distributional learning? Psychonomic bulletin & review. 23, 678-691.
Toscano, J. C., Anderson, N. D., Fabiani, M., Gratton, G., & Garnsey, S. M. 2018 The time-course of cortical responses to speech revealed by fast optical imaging. Brain and Language. 184, 32-42.

Week 7 (3/14🥧) Parallel Parsing; Dependency-Length

Handout (Parsing II -- Semantic and other Effects)
Slides (Parsing as an Engineering Problem)

Core:
Gibson, E. 2000 The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity Image, language, brain. 95-126.
Charniak, E. & Johnson, M. Computational Linguistics (Unpublished manuscript chapter)

Additional:
Konieczny, L. 2000 Locality and parsing complexity. Journal of psycholinguistic research. 29, 627-645.
Hale, J. 2001 A probabilistic Earley parser as a psycholinguistic model. Second meeting of the north american chapter of the association for computational linguistics.

Week 9 (3/28) A trip down the Kindergarten-Path

Handout (Parsing IV -- Surprisal, Kindergarden Path Effect)

Core:
Trueswell, J. C., Sekerina, I., Hill, N. M., & Logrip, M. L. 1999 The kindergarten-path effect: Studying on-line sentence processing in young children. Cognition. 73(2), 89-134.
Woodard, K., Pozzan, L., & Trueswell, J. C. 2016 Taking your own path: Individual differences in executive function and language processing skills in child learners. Journal of experimental child psychology. 141, 187-209.

Additional (Syntactic Adaptation):
Fine, A. B., Jaeger, T. F., Farmer, T. A., & Qian, T. 2013 Rapid expectation adaptation during syntactic comprehension. PloS one. 8(10), e77661.
Harrington Stack, C. M., James, A. N., & Watson, D. G. 2018 A failure to replicate rapid syntactic adaptation in comprehension. Memory & cognition. 46, 864-877.

Additional (Localization of Cognitive Control -- Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus):
Novick, J. M., Kan, I. P., Trueswell, J. C., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. 2009 A case for conflict across multiple domains: Memory and language impairments following damage to ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Cognitive neuropsychology. 26(6), 527-567.
Novick, J. M., Trueswell, J. C., & Thompson‐Schill, S. L. 2010 Broca’s area and language processing: Evidence for the cognitive control connection Language and Linguistics Compass. 4(10), 906-924.

Week 11 (4/11) Language Production (Part I)

Core:
Dell, G. 1995 Speaking and misspeaking. An invitation to cognitive science: Language. 2. Vol. 1. Ch. 7 pg. 183–208.
Bock, K., & Levelt, W. J. 1994 Language production: Grammatical encoding. Academic Press

Bonus:
Bock, K. 1986 Syntactic Persistence in Language Production. Cognitive psychology 18(3), 355-387.
Ferreira, V., & Dell, G. 2000 Effect of ambiguity and lexical availability on syntactic and lexical production Cognitive psychology 40(4), 296-340.
Gleitman, L., January, D., Nappa, R., & Trueswell, J. C. 2007 On the give and take between event apprehension and utterance formulation. Journal of memory and language 57(4), 544-569.

Week 13 (4/25) – No class (Spring Break☀️😎)

Week 15 (5/09) More Word Learning; Categories and Concepts

Core:
Gleitman, L. R., Cassidy, K., Nappa, R., Papafragou, A., & Trueswell, J. C. 2005 Hard words. Language learning and development. 1(1), 23-64.
Xu, F., & Tenenbaum, J. B. 2008 Word learning as Bayesian inference. Psychological review. 114(2), 245.

Additional:
Caplan, S. 2021 Word Learning as Category Formation Immediacy of Linguistics Computation (UPenn Doctoral Dissertation). Ch. 3
Rehder, B., & Hoffman, A. B. 2005 Eyetracking and selective attention in category learning Cognitive psychology. 51(1), 1-41.

Some useful resources