Csaba Pleh Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences 202 Junipero Serra Blvd Stanford, Ca. 94305 T.: (415)321-2052, Fax: ...1192 Home: (415)947-9641 ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Wed, 8 Jan 97 17:01:28 GMT From: INFO-PSYLING moderator Kerry Kilborn &lt;psyling(a)psy.gla.ac.uk&gt; To: distribute-psyling(a)psy.gla.ac.uk Subject: InfoPsyling Resent-Date: Wed, 8 Jan 97 18:21:12 +100 Resent-From: PLEH(a)izabell.elte.hu Resent-To: csaba.pleh(a)casbs.Stanford.EDU 1. IRCS Postdoctoral Fellow 2. Context '97 Workshop 3. Conference: Language and Cognition in Language Acquisition 4. CUNY '97 5. Preprint: Models of Word Reading ------------------------------------------ 1. IRCS Postdoctoral Fellow The Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania provides opportunities for several postdoctoral fellows in Cognitive Science. These fellows pursue their own research, collaborate with IRCS faculty and students, and act as a bridge across the various disciplines represented in Cognitive Science. To apply for a postdoctoral fellowship, please visit the IRCS Postdoctoral Fellow Application website at: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/positions/ircs_postdoc.html We are currently accepting applications for fellowships beginning September 1, 1997. The deadline for applications is February 1, 1997. The University of Pennsylvania is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer. -------------------------------------------------- 2. Context '97 Workshop From: Boicho Kokinov &lt;kokinov(a)cogs.nbu.acad.bg&gt; Subject: Context'97 Workshop - CFP ECCS'97 2nd European Conference on Cognitive Science Manchester, UK, April 9-11, 1997 Workshop on Context The workshop aims at bringing together researchers from various disciplines: artificial intelligence, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, neurosciences, who are interested in various aspects of the notion of context.=20 Researchers in linguistics and communication have studied for a while how the interpretation of an utterance changes when the context changes, how the speaker produces the utterance in accordance with what he/she believes is the current context of the discourse, how the hearer selects or constructs the context in which he/she will be able to understand the message. Researchers in psychology have studied how variations in the context can influence various cognitive processes - perception, language interpretation, reasoning, decision-making, problem solving, learning etc. There are a number of phenomena studied in psychology which can be classified as effects of context: priming effects (in memory studies), framing effects (in decision making), fixedness and set effects (in problem solving), lack of transfer from one context to another (in learning), context effects in perception and interpretation, etc. Recently AI researchers started the endeavour of formalising the concept of context in order to model it in computer simulations. They are mostly interested how context relates to reasoning - how people change the perspective, the line of reasoning, how they think of and compare states of the world in two different moments of time, or in two different situations. Neuroscientists have explored the differences between implicit and explicit memory and learning shedding light on the mechanisms processing the information in human brain. There are a number of differences discovered between explicitly and implicitly represented information and its processing and storage. It seems that the various disciplines and even subfields have different notions of context, but still using the same term, which actually is a sign that each of them is studying a particular aspect of a unique phenomena. This workshop may contribute to a greater mutual understanding between the researchers of context in various subfields and eventually to develop a common theory of context. In other cases people use different terms for different phenomena which, however, seem related, so bringing this researchers together might result in establishing new links between otherwise separate fields. Here are some of the topics which might be discussed during the workshop: * is context a state of the world, a state of the mind, or the information shared in a discourse (communication act), is it an absolute or an relational concept (X is the context of Y); * what are the relations between context, situation, environment, state of mind, working memory; * what is the relation between context-sensitive cognition and situated cognition; * is context being constructed, selected, or is something we are immersed in; * has context an explicit or an implicit representation in human mind; * how context is being formed/established (what are the mechanisms of formation); * how context influences (what are the mechanisms of that influencing) human cognitive processes: memory, reasoning, decision-making, language processing, perception, learning=20 * what are the relations between priming effects, set effects, conceptual fixedness, framing effects, context effects, etc. =46orm of the workshop The workshop will be organised in the following way.=20 1. There is a Web page (http://boogie.cs.unitn.it/eccs-97/) where you can find the list of people expressed their interest in participation in the workshop as well as the electronic discussion on the topics of the workshop. New people can also subscribe to the mailing list there. For sending messages to the list you can use the following address:=20 =20 &lt;underline&gt;&lt;color&gt;&lt;param&gt;0000,0000,FFFF&lt;/param&gt;context-disc(a)cs.unitn.it&lt;/col= or></underline> 2. The discussion so far has emphasised the following four issues that all of us will try to address when presenting our research at the workshop: 1) What is context? 2) How is context represented in human mind (if at all)? 3) What are the mechanisms for building of this representation? 4) What are the mechanisms by which context influences cognitive processes? We can analyse this aspects across various disciplines and various specific cognitive processes. 3. Submitting extended abstracts (6 pages) describing the author's work, relating it to the above issues. The accepted abstracts will be published in the workshop proceedings. Deadline for submission: <underline><color><param>FFFF,0000,0000</param>January 31st, 1997</color></underline> 4. Distribute the abstracts in advance (electronically) and organise an e-mail discussion. 5. Have 3-4 interactive talks during the workshop given by invited speakers from different disciplines (AI, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience) and having two discussants for every speaker ensuring an interdisciplinary discussion of their work. In order to focus all our discussions on matters of joint interest we ask all speakers to address the main issues we will formulate and to present their work in a way accessible to other discipline's representatives. 6. Have a general discussion at the end trying to bring the different perspectives together.=20 7. Select some of the papers submitted to the workshop and invite the authors to write a chapter that will present their work reflecting the discussions held during the workshop as well. As a result we might produce a book that will be accessible to a wide audience from various disciplines and which might be a synthesis of the scientific exchange during the workshop. Organisers: =46austo Giunchiglia (University of Trento, Italy) fausto(a)irst.itc.it Paolo Bouquet (University of Trento, Italy) pbouquet(a)cs.unitn.it Cristiano Castelfranchi (National Research Council, Italy) cris(a)pscs2.irmkant.rm.cnr.it Boicho Kokinov (New Bulgarian University, Bulgaria) kokinov(a)bgearn.acad.bg Timetable and Deadlines: * Submission of papers in both electronic and hardcopy form - January 31st, 1997=20 * Acceptance/rejection notification - March 1st, 1997 * E-mail discussion of the papers - March 1st -31st, 1997 * Workshop - as planed by the PC of ECCS'97 during the period April 9-11th, 1997 Addresses for submission: =46austo Giunchiglia =20 IRST =20 Povo, 38100 Trento, Italy =20 context-eccs(a)cs.unitn.it phone: +39 461 314517 (secr.); +39 461 314436 (off.)=20 fax: +39 461 302040/314591 or Boicho Kokinov Cognitive Science Department New Bulgarian University 21 Montevideo Str. Sofia 1635, Bulgaria kokinov(a)cogs.nbu.acad.bg phone: +359 2 558065 fax: +359 2 565037 Home page: http://boogie.cs.unitn.it/eccs-97/ -------------------------------------------------------- Boicho Kokinov Cognitive Science Department New Bulgarian University 21, Montevideo Str. Sofia 1635, Bulgaria phone: (+3592) 558065 fax: (+3592) 558262 e-mail: kokinov(a)cogs.nbu.acad.bg kokinov(a)bgearn.acad.bg ----------------------------------------------- 3. Conference: Language and Cognition in Language Acquisition From: bleses(a)language.ou.dk (Dorthe Bleses) **********FIRST ANNOUNCEMENT********** NELAS 6- CMLA 2 LANGUAGE AND COGNITION IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION A conference to be held at UNIVERSITY OF ODENSE, DENMARK 20-24 AUGUST 1997 This conference combines the 6th in the series of Northern European Language Acquisition seminars, with the 2nd workshop "Cognitive Models of Language Acquisition" which was first held in Tilburg, the Netherlands, in 1994. The theme of the conference is: WHAT IS THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION AND NON-LINGUISTIC COGNITIVE CAPACITIES AND PROCESSES? This theme will be addressed in the context of both first and second language acquisition, with an emphasis upon the former. PROGRAMME ******Invited Lectures****** (Confirmed) Elizabeth Bates, University of California San Diego Werner Deutsch, University of Braunschweig Jerry Feldman, ICSI and University of California Berkeley Paul van Geert, State University of Groningen Dedre Gentner, Northwestern University Andrew Lock, Massey University Brian MacWhinney, Carnegie Mellon University Michael Tomasello, Emory University Manfred Pienemann, Australian National University ******Workshops and Workshop Presenters****** (to be confirmed) Language and Cognition in First and Second Language Acquisition Ocke Bohn (University of Aarhus) Manfred Pienemann (Australian National University) The Acquisition of Nordic Languages Hrafnhildur Ragnarsdottir (University of Reykjavik) Hanne Gram Simonsen (University of Oslo) Sven Stroemqvist (University of Gothenburg) The Emergence and Development of Signification Maria Lyra (University of Recife) Christian Moro (University of Geneva) Cintia Rodriguez (University of Madrid) *****Poster Sessions***** Submissions of abstracts are invited for poster presentations of research relevant to the theme of the conference. No further lectures will be programmed for the conference, which will consist of plenary lectures, workshops and poster sessions only. There will be no parallel lecture sessions. Depending upon the abstracts submitted and accepted for the poster presentations, one or more further thematic workshops may be incorporated into the programme. LOCATION The conference will be held at the University of Odense, situated in the old Danish port city of Odense, the birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen, on the tranquil and beautiful island of Fyn. Odense is readily accessible by air and surface transport from Copenhagen. The programme will include an optional excursion and conference dinner. REGISTRATION FEE The registration fee for the conference will be DKK (Danish Kroner) 1000,-, including a reception at the beginning of the conference, lunch (Friday, Saturday and Sunday), tea and coffee, copies of all abstracts and participant lists. It is intended that researchers (including PhD students) working on a topic related to the theme of the conference, who are unable to obtain institutional support for the payment of the registration fee, will be entitled to a partial waiver of the registration fee if they can send documentation from their department of its inability to subsidize the registration fee in whole or in part. ACCOMMODATION Information on accommodation will be provided at a later 4 date to individuals pre-registering for the conference. RELATED EVENT- SUMMER SCHOOL IN LANGUAGE ACQUISITION The 1997 European Summer School in Language Acquisition, funded by the European Union and targetted on European PhD students and post-doctoral researchers, will take place at a nearby location on Fyn during the period 13-22 August, 1997. The organiser of the 1997 European Summer School in Language Acquisition is Sven Stroemqvist, University of Gothenburg. Information about the Summer School can be obtained from: prof. Sven Stroemqvist (scientist in charge of the proposal) Department of Linguistics, University of Goeteborg, 412 98 Goeteborg, Sweden Fax +46 31 7734853 sven(a)ling.gu.se PRE-REGISTRATION Information regarding accommodation, conference programme and possibilities for obtaining funding by prospective participants lacking institutional support, will be sent to individuals pre-registering for the conference. THE NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS WILL BE LIMITED IN ORDER TO FACILITATE DISCUSSION AND INTERCHANGE OF IDEAS. IT IS THEREFORE ADVISABLE TO MAKE AN EARLY INDICATION OF YOUR WISH TO ATTEND THE CONFERENCE BY PRE-REGISTERING. Pre-register by e-mailing the Conference Secretariatat the following address: Wagner(a)dou.dk Please indicate if you wish to submit an abstract for a poster presentation, and supply a title. Abstracts will be required tobe submitted by 1 March 1997. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The conference organizers wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Danish Humanities Research Council and the Department of Language and Communication, University of Odense, in making this conference possible. Conference Organizing Committee Hans Basboell, Dorthe Bleses, Rineke Brouwer and Johannes Wagner (University of Odense) & Chris Sinha, Kristine Jensen de Lopez (University of Aarhus) ---------------------------------------------- 4. CUNY '97 From: Joe Allen &lt;joeallen(a)siva.usc.edu&gt; Subject: CUNY 97 The 10th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing March 20-22, 1997 Doubletree Guest Suites Hotel, Santa Monica, California Sponsors: University of Southern California, National Science Foundation, University of Massachusetts, University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University Abstract Review Board: Amit Almor, Gerry Altmann, Tom Bever, Julie Boland, Morten Christiansen, Chuck Clifton, Jeff Elman, Susan Garnsey, Ted Gibson, Mike Kelly, Ken McRae, Don Mitchell, Janet Nicol, Neal Pearlmutter, Shari Speer, Suzanne Stevenson, John Trueswell Schedule of Talks: Day 1, Thursday, March 20 8 am Registration & Continental Breakfast Morning Sessions John Trueswell & Albert Kim (University of Pennsylvania), "How to prune a garden-path by nipping it in the bud: Fast priming of verb argument structure and the resolution of syntactic ambiguity" Jonathan King, Seana Coulson, Kara Federmeier, & Marta Kutas (UCSD) "Saccade-related potentials: A truly on-line method to study reading" Shelia Kennison (University of Oklahoma) "Processing agentive 'by'- phrases in event and nonevent nominals" Barbara Hemforth (Frieburg), Lars Konieczny (University of the Saarland) & Christoph Scheepers (Frieburg), "A principled model of modifier attachment" Yuki Hirose (CUNY), "Relative clause reanalysis and head noun ambiguity" Danijela Stojanovic (University of Ottawa) "Processing filler-gap dependencies in Serbo-Croatian" Afternoon Sessions: John O'Neil (Harvard) "Syntax and symbolic dynamics" Ken McRae (Western Ontario), Michael Spivey-Knowlton (Cornell) & Michael Tanenhaus (Rochester) "Comparing implemented versions of the constraint based and garden path models of sentence comprehension" Suzanne Stevenson (Rutgers), "Competition in sentence processing: Computational modeling and behavioral consequences" Gary Marcus (UMASS) "Single recurrent networks and the acquisition of syntax" Whitney Tabor, (MIT), Cornell Juliano, & Michael Tanenhaus, (University of Rochester) "The interaction of syntactic and lexical constraints in sentence processing: A dynamical systems approach" Day 2, Friday, March 21 1st Morning session Laurie Stowe, A.A. Wijers, A.T.M. Willemsen, A.M.J. Pans, G. Mulder, F. Zwarts (University of Gronigen), "Syntactic complexity and verbal working memory" Paul Allopena, James Magnuson & Michael Tanenhaus (University of Rochester) "Speech in time primes rhymes: Using eye movements to track lexical access in continuous speech" Amy Schafer & Shari Speer (University of Kansas) "The effect of intonational phrasing on lexical interpretation" Morning & Afternoon: Special Session on the Link Between Child Language Acquisition and Adult Language Comprehension Tom Bever (University of Arizona) "Acquisition and processing: An overview" Jeff Elman (UCSD) "Language as a dynamical system" Gerry Altmann (University of York) "Mapping sentences to the real world in acquisition and adult comprehension" Joe Allen (USC) "Entailment and the verbal lexicon" Michael Kelly (University of Pennsylvania) "Statistical patterns in the lexicon: Implications for language acquisition and sentence comprehension" Jenny Saffran (University of Rochester) "Statistical learning and language acquisition: Implications for adult language processing" Ron Smyth (University of Toronto) "Prosody, overt number markers, and late closure in the acquisition of subject-verb agreement with complex NPs" Helen Goodluck (University of Ottawa) "Processing gaps: Constraints and Learnability" Day 3, Saturday, March 22 Morning sessions: Elizabeth Bates (UCSD), Anotella Devescovi (University of Rome), Nina Dronkers (UC Davis), Beverly Wulfeck & Nicole Cooper (San Diego State), "Processing complex syntax: A comparative study" Evelyn Ferstl & Angela Friederici (Max Planck for Cognitive Neuroscience), "Inter-sentential context effects on parsing: A study using event-related potentials" Colin Brown, Peter Hagoort, & Wietske Vonk (Max Planck for Psycholinguistics) Semantic effects on syntactic analyses: Evidence from brain potential recordings. Richard Lewis (Ohio State) "Reanalysis and limited repair parsing: Leaping off the garden path" Ted Gibson, Maria Babyonyshev (MIT) & James Thomas (CMU), "Sentential complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies" Martin Pickering (Glasgow), Matthew Crocker (Edinburgh), & Nick Chater (Warwick), "A rational analysis of human sentence processing: Adopting the most informative analysis" Afternoon session Rosemary Stevenson (University of Durham), "Structural focusing, semantic/pragmatic focusing and the representation of actions and states" Melody Terras & Simon Garrod, University of Glasgow, "The contribution of lexical and contextual information to the establishment of instrument discourse roles" Julie Sedivy, Craig Chambers, Michael Tanenhaus & Greg Carlson (University of Rochester) "How tall is tall? Using head-based and contextual information in processing the meaning of adjectives" Gail McKoon & Roger Ratcliff (Northwestern) "Discourse, meaning, syntax, and verb phrase anaphors" Conference ends at approximately 3:30 pm Two poster sessions will be held on Day 2, one at lunch time and one in the early evening. The deadline for abstracts considered for these poster sessions is January 15, 1997. Check our website http://siva.usc.edu/~cuny97/ for hotel and conference details, abstract submission information, and links to our sponsors. Registration information will be published in January. -------------------------------------------------- 5. Preprint: Models of Word Reading Subject: Preprint: Models of Word Reading and Lexical Decision From: David Plaut &lt;plaut(a)cmu.edu&gt; The following preprint is available via anonymous ftp and the web: Structure and function in the lexical system: Insights from distributed models of word reading and lexical decision David C. Plaut Departments of Psychology and Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, Pittsburgh PA, USA To appear in Language and Cognitive Processes The traditional view of the lexical system stipulates word-specific representations and separate pathways for regular and exception words. An alternative approach views lexical knowledge as developing from general learning principles applied to mappings among distributed representations of written and spoken words and their meanings. On this distributed account, distinctions among words and between words and nonwords are not reified in the structure of the system but reflect the sensitivity of learning to the relative systematicity in the various mappings. Two simulation experiments address findings that have seemed problematic for the distributed approach. Both involve a consideration of the role of semantics in normal and impaired lexical processing. The first experiment accounts for patients with impaired comprehension but intact reading in terms of individual differences in the division of labor between the semantic and phonological pathways. The second experiment demonstrates that a distributed network can reliably distinguish words from nonwords based on a measure of familiarity defined over semantics. The results underscore the importance of relating function to structure in the lexical system within the context of an explicit computational framework. ftp-host: cnbc.cmu.edu [128.2.244.1] ftp-file: pub/user/plaut/papers/PlautINPRESSLCP.structure.ps.Z OR pub/user/plaut/papers/uncompressed/PlautINPRESSLCP.structure.ps ftp://cnbc.cmu.edu:/pub/user/plaut/papers/PlautINPRESSLCP.structure.ps.Z 19 pages; 183Kb compressed; 498Kb uncompressed =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= David Plaut &lt;plaut(a)cmu.edu&gt; Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and Mellon Institute 115, CNBC Departments of Psychology and Computer Science Carnegie Mellon University MI 115I, 412/268-5145 (fax -5060) 4400 Fifth Ave., Pittsburgh PA 15213-2683 http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~plaut "Doubt is not a pleasant condition but certainty is an absurd one." -Voltaire =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=