Topic: speaker identity

Over the past 50 years, sociolinguistic studies on black Americans have expanded in both theoretical and technical scope, and newer research has moved beyond seeing speakers, especially black speakers, as a monolithic sociolinguistic community (Wolfram 2007, Blake 2014). Yet there remains a dearth of critical work on complex identities existing within black American communities as well as how these identities are reflected and perceived in linguistic practice. At the same time, linguists have begun to take greater interest in the ways in which public figures, such as politicians, may illuminat

Animals experience the world as a continuous sequence of complex high-dimensional sensory stimuli. They need to build internal models from this ongoing stream of experiences with few supervisory and reinforcement signals. How they accomplish this feat remains unclear. One possibility is that the brain relies on a slowness objective (SO) which stipulates that neuronal representations change little over time$^1$. This allows extracting slowly varying underlying factors from the sensory experience, in some cases, with local plasticity rules$^2$. However, the approach precludes exploiting the rich