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SUMMARY:Interdisciplinarity: The art of unsettling multiple disciplines - 
 Petar Milin (Sheffield)
DTSTART:20180125T110000Z
DTEND:20180125T120000Z
UID:TALK99541@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dimitri Kartsaklis
DESCRIPTION:Charles Darwin once said that “it is the long history of hum
 ankind (and animal kind\, too) that those who learned to collaborate and i
 mprovise most effectively have prevailed”. On first encounter\, many may
  find interdisciplinarity unsettling as it appears to devalue disciplinary
  expertise and the identity that comes with such expertise. And maybe it r
 eally does: integrative interdisciplinarity relies on mutually complementa
 ry theories\, shared testable hypotheses\, and interspersed methodological
  endeavour. Anything that is shared across disciplines will\, by definitio
 n\, not coincide with anyone’s customary way of doing things.\n\nIn my t
 alk I will present two case studies to illustrate the rationale behind the
  Leverhulme- funded research project “Out of Our Minds”. The overarchi
 ng aim of this project is to propose a novel way of describing language da
 ta that yields a cognitively plausible description of speakers’ linguist
 ic knowledge. The research methodology combines corpus-based analyses\, be
 havioural experimentation and computational modelling\, thereby embodying 
 the true interdisciplinary core of what we like to call Language Sciences.
 \n\nThe first study scrutinizes the role orthographic and semantic informa
 tion play in the behaviour of skilled readers. Reading latencies from a se
 lf-paced sentence reading experiment in which Russian near-synonymous verb
 s were manipulated appear well- predicted by a complex interplay of bottom
 -up and top-down support from orthography and semantics. Individual differ
 ences in mental speed modulate this interplay and show a fascinating compl
 exity at the interface of language and behaviour.\n\nThe second study shed
 s new light on seemingly unmotivated allomorphy in the genitive singular o
 f Polish masculine nouns and demonstrates how biologically inspired machin
 e learning techniques can pinpoint the essence of native speaker intuition
 s. The model explains the unexpected preference of -a as genitive ending f
 or new words in terms of the learnability of words taking that ending\, th
 eir phonological predictability and their contextual typicality.\n\nOn the
 ir own linguists and psychologists would have approached these questions r
 ather differently\, and would have arrived at answers that would necessari
 ly have remained partial. I hope that the prospects for further investigat
 ion that this interdisciplinary approach opens up will convince linguists\
 , psychologists and computer scientists to bury the hatchet\, relic of old
  disciplines bound by (parochial) traditions\, and to set off on a joint j
 ourney towards a unifying perspective on language phenomena.
LOCATION:Boardroom\, Faculty of English\, West Road
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