Language evolution seminar

Speaker: Lauren Fletcher (University of Edinburgh)

Title: Language Evolution & Neurodiversity: Progress and Future Directions

Abstract: Many neurodivergent individuals are members of wider speech communities, and yet their impact on language change and evolution has been largely overlooked. Many disabilities that fall under the neurodivergency umbrella are considered exclusion criteria from psychological and linguistic studies. In this work, we wish to bring neurodivergent people back into the language evolution picture, to both understand the impact neurodivergent people may have on what language looks like, and to potentially illuminate some cognitive differences in neurodivergent individuals.

In this talk, I discuss current progress and future directions for this project. I will give details of our first study, a replication of Roberts & Fedzechkina (2018) and Fedzechkina & Roberts (2020) with autistic participants. This had two aims: 1) establish a baseline of performance by autistic people in artificial language learning tasks (as there is not a sufficient baseline in the literature); 2) understand if social biases impact how autistic people learn and use language. Initial results suggest no difference in baseline performance in autistic individuals with regards to case marking usage, but that autistic people may be more sensitive to certain social biases and increase their use of case in response to that. I will discuss future directions for the project, including a brief overview of upcoming experimental and computational work.

Contact

Seminars are organised by the Centre for Language Evolution

• Elizabeth Pankratz

• Centre for Language Evolution