SQI Seminar Series: Tal Linzen, NYU
Tal Linzen, an associate professor of linguistics and data science at New York University and a research scientist at Google, will speak in MIT's Siegel Family Quest for Intelligence seminar series. His work combines behavioral experiments and computational methods to study language learning and comprehension, alongside large-language-model post-training, evaluation, and interpretability.
Prosody in the voice, face, and hands changes which words you hear
Speech may be characterized as conveying both segmental information (i.e., about vowels and consonants) as well as suprasegmental information - cued through pitch, intensity, and duration - also known as the prosody of speech. In this contribution, I will argue that prosody shapes low-level speech perception, changing which speech sounds we hear. Perhaps the most notable example of how prosody guides word recognition is the phenomenon of lexical stress, whereby suprasegmental F0, intensity, and duration cues can distinguish otherwise segmentally identical words, such as "PLAto" vs. "plaTEAU" in Dutch. Work from our group showcases the vast variability in how different talkers produce stressed vs. unstressed syllables, while also unveiling the remarkable flexibility with which listeners can learn to handle this between-talker variability. It also emphasizes that lexical stress is a multimodal linguistic phenomenon, with the voice, lips, and even hands conveying stress in concert. In turn, human listeners actively weigh these multisensory cues to stress depending on the listening conditions at hand. Finally, lexical stress is presented as having a robust and lasting impact on low-level speech perception, even down to changing vowel perception. Thus, prosody - in all its multisensory forms - is a potent factor in speech perception, determining what speech sounds we hear.
Verb metaphors are processed as analogies
Metaphor is a pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. To date, the vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun-noun metaphors of the form An X is a Y (e.g., My job is a jail). Yet there is evidence that verb metaphor (e.g., I sailed through my exams) is more common. Despite this, comparatively little work has examined how verb metaphors are processed. In this talk, I will propose a novel account for verb metaphor comprehension: verb metaphors are understood in the same way that analogies are—as comparisons processed via structure-mapping. I will discuss the predictions that arise from applying the analogical framework to verb metaphor and present a series of experiments showing that verb metaphoric extension is consistent with those predictions.