Dear all, This is a reminder for our next talk today. ---------- The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to its talk by Prof. Juan M. Toro (Center for Brain and Cognition ICREA - University Pompeu Fabra) Date: Wednesday, October 7, 2015 - 17:00-18:30 Something old, something new: Combining mechanisms during language acquisition Abstract: I will present recent research on two separate topics that suggests human infants use a combination of both evolutionary old and new cognitive tools to tackle the task of language acquisition. Research on the principles that guide how humans and non-human animals group sequences of sounds has shown that we share with other species perceptual biases that we apply to linguistic stimuli. On the contrary, research on processing differences between consonants and vowels suggests humans, but not other animals, benefit from a "division of labor” across phonological representations. This division would help to extract regularities from the speech signal and facilitate language learning. The studies I will present provide support to the idea that perceptual biases together with language-specific representations guide the discovery of linguistic structures. Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 street 7, room 101. We are looking forward to see you there (Oktober 6 street 7)! Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events ______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu