News
Two new first-year BCS students - Jorie Koster-Moeller (Pomona College) and Melissa Kline (Brown University) - are currently doing rotations in the lab.
An old TedLab tradition is revived
The "death march" is back. Here is a picture from the hiking trip that took place in NH July 18-21.
From left to right: 1st row - Mitchell (a.k.a. Marshall) Gibson, Mike Frank, Chris Saenz, Ev Fedorenko, Celeste Kidd, Melissa Troyer, Giulia Pancani; 2nd row - Ted, Steve Piantadosi
Mike Frank got a faculty position at Stanford University
He will be starting in the fall of 2010. Congrats, Mike!
Top 100 Stories of 2008
Our Cognition paper (Frank, Everett, Fedorenko & Gibson, "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition") was listed as #39 in the Top 100 Stories of 2008 by the Discover magazine.
Ted and Ev's new class "Quantitative Approaches to Syntax"
In the fall of 2008, we taught a new graduate seminar "Quantitative Approaches to Syntax". The goal of the class was to provide motivated graduate students with an opportunity to design, carry out and analyze an experiment quantitatively evaluating some question related to sentence-level processing. We strongly encouraged students with either a psychology / cognitive science background and less of a linguistics background or students with a linguistics background and less of a psychology background to take the class. The class was a great success, and we are planning to teach it again in the 2009-2010 academic year.
Ev and Ted got married
On October 25, 2008, Ev and Ted got married at the MIT boathouse (thanks to Tony "coach K" Kilbridge). Thanks to all the lab friends, other friends and family for coming and helping us celebrate our special day!
Standing from left to right: 1st row - Mara Breen, Melissa Troyer, Tessa Warren, Ted, Ev, Doug Rohde, John Hale, Anubha Kothari, Meredith Brown, Hal Tily
2nd row - Steve Piantadosi, Michael Wagner, Florian Jaeger
Sitting/kneeling - Ada Breen Bouthet, Timmy Desmet, Mike Frank, Dan Grodner
Mike Frank received the Marr Prize
At CogSci 2008 in July 2008, Mike Frank received the Marr Prize for the paper Frank, Fedorenko & Gibson, "Language as a cognitive technology: English-speakers match like Pirahã when you don't let them count". Congrats, Mike!
The Pirahã in the News
There has been a lot of recent controversy surrounding a small tribe in the Amazonian forest in Brazil: the Pirahã. Intrigued by some of the claims about the Pirahã’s cognition and culture, our lab recently started a collaboration with Dan Everett, a linguist and an anthropologist who has been living on and off with the Pirahã since the late 70’s. A paper describing some experiments we conducted in Brazil in January 2007 on Pirahã's numerical cognition is in the Publications section. Papers describing other experiments (in the domains of language, visual processing and short-term memory) are currently in preparation.
November 2008
Dan Everett's book "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazon Jungle" is now out.
Summer 2008
Here are some links (some from the popular press) discussing our findings on Pirahã number processing:
- MIT News
- Science News
- The Telegraph (UK)
- Slashdot
- The Daily Gazette (Swarthmore College) [But note that there in an inaccuracy in the text: Gibson does not agree with Nevins, Pesetsky & Rodriguez over Everett, as claimed in this article.]
- Daily Galaxy Blog
- Brain Mysteries
- AP News wire on a recent paper by Butterworth et al. (PNAS, 2008): response in the article by Gibson, Frank, Fedorenko and Everett
2007
There has been some discussion about the Pirahã on the Language Log and on The Edge.
An article about Dan Everett and his life in the Pirahã village appeared in the April 2007 issue of the New Yorker.
Dan Everett also organized a conference on Recursion in Human Languages that took place in Normal, IL in April 2007. Proceedings of the conference will be published in a special issue of The Linguistic Review. Stay tuned.
2006
Dan Everett gave a talk at MIT on December 1, 2006.
Here is a copy of the handout from the talk: Handout link
Here is the audio recording (requires Windows Media Player): Recording link
Florian Wolf & Ted Gibson’s book on discourse
Buy it at MIT Press:
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=10908
Endorsements:
"In its biggest step forward since Aristotle, research on discourse structure has come down to earth by combining analysis of real-world text corpora with data about human readers. Wolf and Gibson's book documents and advances the state of our knowledge in today's liveliest area of linguistic analysis."
--Mark Liberman, Director, Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
"An extensive analysis of discourse coherence that is at once theoretically motivated and empirically driven, with demonstrated applications to problems in both computational linguistics and psycholinguistics."
--Andrew Kehler, Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego
