The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Social Mind Center cordially invites you to its talk by Shiri Lev-Ari <http://www.mpi.nl/people/lev-ari-shiri> (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) Date: Wednesday, May 10, 2017 - 17:00-18:30 Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 St. 7, room 101 How our social network size influences our linguistic skills and linguistic malleability Does the size of our social network influence how good we are at understanding others or how influenced we are by others' speech patterns? Previous research shows that both infants and adults are better at learning new phonological categories when exposed to multiple speakers compared with only one. In this talk, I'll present converging evidence from individual differences studies, experimental studies, and computational simulations to show that the size of our social network influences our linguistic skills even as adult native speakers, and, in particular, that having a larger social network leads to better comprehension at the phonological and semantic levels. I'll further show that having a smaller social network leads to more malleable representations and use. Thus, aspects of our life-style, such as the size of our social network, can influence how we learn, use, and represent language. We are looking forward to see you at the talk! Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events Social Mind Center Events at CEU: http://socialmind.ceu.edu/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