Login
Computer Science @ Rochester
Friday, December 14, 2012
12:45 PM
CSB 703
Steven T. Piantadosi
University of Rochester
The communicative design of human language
I'll talk about recent work in collaboration with Ted Gibson and Hal Tily arguing that key features of linguistic systems are well-designed specifically for communicative purposes, in contrast to some popular linguistic theories. I'll discuss our results testing for communicative design in lexical systems, and (briefly) language processing mechanisms. One of the primary arguments against communicative language design is the existence of ambiguity, which appears naively to be undesirable in a communication system. In contrast, I'll additionally argue that ambiguity falls out naturally from considerations of communicative efficiency. In general, our results suggest that an information-theoretic approach provides principled explanations for some otherwise puzzling feature of human language.