Spring 2024 Colloquium - Rachel Ryskin - Language adaptation across timescales

Abstract: Language is a complex system. Each individual speaker’s behavior reflects myriad social and cognitive processes. Jointly all these speakers’ behaviors give rise to the patterns of language use which can be observed in corpora. This system is also adaptive: a speaker’s behavior is based on their past interactions. And these interrelated patterns of experience affect how the language changes over time. In this talk, I will discuss some new work on the relationship between adaptation at the individual speaker level and diachronic change at the language level. We approach this by analyzing diachronic corpora and comparing language use across age cohorts. We observe striking similarities in language use between younger and older adults at the level of lexical semantics but some dissimilarities at the level of syntax and prediction from context. We interpret these findings in light of differences in the timescale at which different features of the language change.

Event Logistics: 3pm in Kerr 273 on May 13th.

Speaker Biography: Dr. Rachel Ryskin is an Assistant Professor of Cognitive & Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced.