User:John Pate: Difference between revisions

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I'm a third year undergraduate at the Ohio State University in Columbus,
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Ohio, double-majoring in Linguistics and Philosophy along with a minor in
I am a student at the Ohio State University pursuing a B.A. in Linguistics with minors in Cognitive Science and Philosophy. Concurrently with the B.A., I am pursuing an M.A. in Linguistics through an accelerated double-degree program.
Cultural Anthropology. I am interested in understanding human natural
 
language acquisition and processing through statistical and
Specifically, I am interested in certain strong statements about linguistic theories that have been made on the basis of an argument called the "Poverty of the Stimulus." This argument holds that the linguistic signal does not contain very much information about the structures it specifies, which would presumably mean that infants, who very apparently succeed in learning those structures, must come "pre-programmed" with strong expectations about what language is like. However, since the representations used in linguistic theories typically abstract away from the actual linguistic signal, it is far from clear just how poverty-stricken the stimulus might be. To assess the information content of the linguistic signal, I have begun looking at the information conveyed by variation in the long-term statistical distribution of linguistic objects, and also by variation in the acoustic signal. The next step, of course, will be to see if children are, in fact, sensitive to the sorts of variation employed by models.
information-theoretic approaches to processing very large corpora, with
 
the ultimate goal of pursuing insight into consciousness and experience.
http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0930006/
I find all of linguistics fascinating, and have done work with a number
of the faculty here at Ohio State. During the schoolyear, I am a research
assistant to phonetician [http://ling.osu.edu/~cclopper Cynthia Clopper],  
who has been working on cross-dialectal language perception. I am
currently (Summer 2007) working as a research assistant to sociolinguist
[http://ling.osu.edu/~dwinford Don Winford] on a project in African
American Vernacular English (AAVE). Beginning in the Fall of 2007 I will  
be a research assistant in [http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/wagner/ Laura Wagner]'s [http://dlcl.osu.edu/ Developmental Language and Cognition Lab].


[[Category:CZ Authors| Pate, John]]
[[Category:CZ Authors| Pate, John]]
[[Category:Linguistics Authors|Pate, John]]
[[Category:Linguistics Authors|Pate, John]]
[[Category:Computers Authors|Pate, John]]

Latest revision as of 04:06, 22 November 2023


The account of this former contributor was not re-activated after the server upgrade of March 2022.


I am a student at the Ohio State University pursuing a B.A. in Linguistics with minors in Cognitive Science and Philosophy. Concurrently with the B.A., I am pursuing an M.A. in Linguistics through an accelerated double-degree program.

Specifically, I am interested in certain strong statements about linguistic theories that have been made on the basis of an argument called the "Poverty of the Stimulus." This argument holds that the linguistic signal does not contain very much information about the structures it specifies, which would presumably mean that infants, who very apparently succeed in learning those structures, must come "pre-programmed" with strong expectations about what language is like. However, since the representations used in linguistic theories typically abstract away from the actual linguistic signal, it is far from clear just how poverty-stricken the stimulus might be. To assess the information content of the linguistic signal, I have begun looking at the information conveyed by variation in the long-term statistical distribution of linguistic objects, and also by variation in the acoustic signal. The next step, of course, will be to see if children are, in fact, sensitive to the sorts of variation employed by models.

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/s0930006/