Abigail Fergus, Psychology and Cognitive Science Fellow, Princeton University

“Verbatim memory, interference, and emergent generalizations in language”

Abstract: Learning a language requires a combination of item-specific knowledge and generalizations about many particular grammatical constructions and their felicitous contexts of use, which vary across languages. Today, we will explore these two aspects through an investigation of the nature of memory for item-specific knowledge (i.e., verbatim memory) and the emergence of grammatical generalizations (i.e., constructions). Specifically, we hypothesize that interference between related forms in memory leads to an emergent generalization as memory for specifics is impaired and a generalization across similar aspects of the utterances arises.