I just found a short informal description of an experiment on “or”:
The experimenters are looking at the relation between the prosody and the meaning of disjunctive clauses in both declarative and interrogative contexts. Some of your presented projects that relate very much to the experimental manipulation.
Enjoy!
In Friday’s class we covered the association of labels to objects in early language acquisition. Since children can successively associate novel names with objects very quickly, often with a single exposure, this association is call “fast mapping.”
I presented this paper from Justin Halberda. It’s a wonderfully clear concise description of the experiment.
We also discussed whether fast mapping is an ability unique to humans. In a short 2004 science article, scientists from the Max Planck Institute claim that a (very unique) border collie displays an ability to associate novel labels to objects rapidly. We evaluated whether their claim that a single cognitive mechanism responsible for this association could be shared by humans and animals alike. We decided that the connection was severely lacking. See Paul Bloom’s reply to their article here. For those who are interested, I am also posting a short article by Hauser, Chomsky & Fitch on the faculty of language and biology.
We ended by discussing Alex the Parrot, a 30 year old African gray, who was reportedly able to respond to a number questions about color, number, and the like. See Alex in action in here.
Slides for this lecture may be found here.
Some of you have expressed interested in learning about the statistics behind the experimentation. I’m more than happy to guide you through the basics. Just email me if you’re interested. Perhaps we can set up a special session for those students who wish to include more analysis in their write up.
However, I should stress that doing statistics for your final papers is not required, nor will it necessarily affect your grade. Yet, I think it’s great to know for independent reasons and could be applicable to other areas of interest.
Anyway, a wonderful overview chapter on statistics in experimentation may be found in an article by Thomas Wickens published in An Invitation to Cognitive Science – 2nd Edition: Vol. 4, accessible through campus for online viewing here:
Drawing Conclusions from Data: Statistical Methods for Coping with Uncertainty
Simple statistical analysis (like t-tests) can be computed easily within Excel. I personally use the open source R software, which has a much steeper learning curve but will pay off in the long run:
Here are the slides from last week’s sessions:
2. Experimental Method, Part I
3. Experimental Method, Part II
4. Experimental Case Study: Perspectival shifts in epithets
Please let email me if you have any questions about the material covered in these handouts.
Even though Angelika will be away this week, we’ll be covering a lot of important material. You can find a schedule for the week here:
While I won’t assign additional homework, you will need to participate in a questionnaire, due by Monday night :
Please take it someplace quiet, without music or distractions, so that you can concentrate on the task. You should use your intuitions about what the sentence means. It probably won’t take more than 30 minutes.
Also, you should read the article by de Villiers and Roeper, as well as the one by Gordan, posted on the course website by Wednesday.
Angelika will be leading the lab on fieldwork tomorrow. To prepare, you should read over Lisa Matthewson’s paper on Semantic Fieldwork.
[Pressed for time? Try this handout, from UMass' own Jan Anderssen.]
An excellent introduction of English nouns, determiners, quantifiers, pronouns, etc. can be found in Huddleston & Pullum’s A Student’s Introduction to English Grammar. This is a detailed, yet accessible book. I’ve scanned chapter 5 for you:
In addition, if you are having trouble finding a phenomena to study for the final project, definitely look here. There is a wealth of data and interesting contrasts that could be tested further. Since we’re concentrating on the DP in this class, the most successful projects will probably be those that are tied closely to the material we cover in class. This book will help.
In Chapter 1 of Partee et al, there was a discussion of Russell’s Paradox. We asked you to skip over this part and to focus instead on getting comfortable with the basics of sets, operations and relations.
I found a lovely discussion of Russell’s paradox in a book called Sweet Reason by two Smith College professors. If you’re interested, you can read it here. This passage is great, not just for its clear discussion of the paradox, but for reporting how Russell saw that Frege humbly persevered in the face of a crushing setback.
An excellent overview of the basics of Genericity may be found here.
The first few sections (1 – 2) are perhaps the most important for deciphering the terminology. I suggest reading the rest of the article, too. Don’t worry if some of the symbols don’t make sense to you, just try to get an intuition behind the semantic distinctions between kind, generic, bare plurals, and singular and plural forms.