Language Acquisition
language acquisition
N/A
The CDT in NLP offers unique, tailored doctoral training comprising both taught courses and a doctoral dissertation over four years. Each student will take a set of courses designed to complement their existing expertise and give them an interdisciplinary perspective on NLP. The studentships are fully funded for the four years and come with a generous allowance for travel, equipment and research costs. The CDT brings together researchers in NLP, speech, linguistics, cognitive science and design informatics from across the University of Edinburgh. Students will be supervised by a world-class faculty comprising almost 60 supervisors and will benefit from cutting edge computing and experimental facilities, including a large GPU cluster and eye-tracking, speech, virtual reality and visualisation labs. The CDT involves a number of industrial partners, including Amazon, Facebook, Huawei, Microsoft, Naver, Toshiba, and the BBC. Links also exist with the Alan Turing Institute and the Bayes Centre.
Towards an inclusive neurobiology of language
Understanding how our brains process language is one of the fundamental issues in cognitive science. In order to reach such understanding, it is critical to cover the full spectrum of manners in which humans acquire and experience language. However, due to a myriad of socioeconomic factors, research has disproportionately focused on monolingual English speakers. In this talk, I present a series of studies that systematically target fundamental questions about bilingual language use across a range of conversational contexts, both in production and comprehension. The results lay the groundwork to propose a more inclusive theory of the neurobiology of language, with an architecture that assumes a common selection principle at each linguistic level and can account for attested features of both bilingual and monolingual speech in, but crucially also out of, experimental settings.
Space for Thinking - Spatial Reference Frames and Abstract Concepts
People from cultures around the world tend to borrow from the domain of space to represent abstract concepts. For example, in the domain on time, we use spatial metaphors (e.g., describing the future as being in front and the past behind), accompany our speech with spatial gestures (e.g., gesturing to the left to refer to a past event), and use external tools that project time onto a spatial reference frame (e.g., calendars). Importantly, these associations are also present in the way we think and reason about time, suggesting that space and time are also linked in the mind. In this talk, I will explore the developmental origins and functional implications of these types of cross-dimensional associations. To start, I will discuss the roles that language and culture play in shaping how children in the US and India represent time. Next, I will use word learning and memory as test cases for exploring why cross-dimensional associations may be cognitively advantageous. Finally, I will talk about future directions and the practical implications for this line of work, with a focus on how encouraging spatial representations of abstract concepts could improve learning outcomes.
Simulated Language Acquisition in a Biologically Realistic Model of the Brain
COSYNE 2025