Linguistics Colloquium - Annemarie Kocab / The Origins of Language: Evidence from Nicaraguan Sign Language and Homesign
Linguistics Colloquium - Annemarie Kocab / The Origins of Language: Evidence from Nicaraguan Sign Language and Homesign
Friday the 24th of April, Annemarie Kocab joins us from up the road in Johns Hopkins to discuss her work on acquisition and sign languages.
All human societies have languages capable of expressing the richness of human thought. To what extent is this achievement an historical accomplishment, similar to mathematics or science, and to what extent does it rely on our evolved cognitive capacities? My lab studies these questions by looking at language creation and emergence in different communities, including Lengua de Señas Nicaragüense (also known as Nicaraguan Sign Language), a language only 50 years old, and homesign systems. I will present results from a case study showing rapid emergence of devices for marking event participants. One possible explanation for these findings is that features that emerge early are those that reflect underlying shared semantic structures that are universal (or nearly) in languages. In contrast, the features that emerge later (e.g., grammatical morphology) may be those that vary across languages and require convergence and iterated learning. In the second part of my talk, I will discuss a different line of research looking at deep learning models with sign language datasets.