Language and Cognition

Preliminary Investigations into the Communicative Efficiency of Logographic Writing Systems and Written Languages

Noah Hermalin
2025

It has been argued that language is shaped, at least in part, by functional cognitive pressures to communicate efficiently. The question of whether or not language is efficient has been explored relative to a wide range of linguistic phenomena, and there is mounting evidence that languages do seem to be communicatively efficient. One area which is underexplored in the efficiency literature, however, is whether there is evidence for efficiency pressures shaping writing systems and written language. In the absence of dedicated studies on efficiency in the written modality, it is difficult to say...

Gahl publishes in Language

January 21, 2025

Congratulations to Susanne Gahl on her new article (with R. Harald Baayen), "Time and thyme again: Connecting English spoken word duration to models of the mental lexicon," Language 100.4 (2024), 623-670.

Sweetser presents keynote at workshop on Figurative Language and Large Language Models

September 19, 2024
Eve Sweetser will be making a keynote presentation, "MetaNet: its current status and future directions," in the workshop on Figurative Language and Large Language Models, at the 21st EURALEX conference in Cavtat, Croatia (Oct. 8-12, 2024).

Modeling the Role of Social Information in Speech Perception

Emily Remirez
2024

Regier awarded honorary doctorate

October 20, 2023

Congratulations to Terry Regier, who has been awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Gothenburg. On October 18, in connection with that award, a workshop on the "Frontiers of AI and the Cognitive Science of...

Interpreting Intermediate Convolutional Layers of Generative CNNs Trained on Waveforms

Gašper Beguš
Alan Zhou
2022

This paper presents a technique to interpret and visualize intermediate layers in generative CNNs trained on raw speech data in an unsupervised manner. We argue that averaging over feature maps after ReLU activation in each transpose convolutional layer yields interpretable time-series data. This technique allows for acoustic analysis of intermediate layers that parallels the acoustic analysis of human speech data: we can extract F0, intensity, duration, formants, and other acoustic properties from intermediate layers in order to test where and how CNNs encode various types of...

Encoding of speech in convolutional layers and the brain stem based on language experience

Gašper Beguš
Alan Zhou
Christina Zhao
2023

Comparing artificial neural networks with outputs of neuroimaging techniques has recently seen substantial advances in (computer) vision and text-based language models. Here, we propose a framework to compare biological and artificial neural computations of spoken language representations and propose several new challenges to this paradigm. The proposed technique is based on a similar principle that underlies electroencephalography (EEG): averaging of neural (artificial or biological) activity across neurons in the time domain, and allows to compare encoding of any acoustic property in the...

Berkeley linguists @ RaAM16

April 11, 2023

The following papers from our department have been accepted for presentation at the 16th Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM16) conference, hosted at the Universidad de Alcalá, Spain, from June 28 to 30, 2023:

Bryce Wallace and Eve Sweetser: "Anti-Vax framings and metaphors: What makes an Anti-Vaxxer?" Eve Sweetser: "Culturally based metaphors, frame metonymy, and 'culturally primary' associations."

The Integration of Social and Acoustic Cues During Speech Perception

Eric Wilbanks
2022

Perceptual learning for speech: Mechanisms of phonetic adaptation to an unfamiliar accent

Yevgeniy Melguy
2022