Category: Events

Last Friday, the Department held a colloquium with Professor Matt Wagers as the invited speaker. Matt’s talk was entitled “Setting healthy (mnemonic) boundaries”:

Nearly 20 years ago, Lewis & Vasishth (2005) applied the ACT-R modeling framework to language processing by creating an English parser fragment embedded in an associative memory. McElree (2000) and McElree, Foraker & Dyer (2003) informed this development by providing earlier arguments in favor of such a content-addressable memory. This proved to be hugely influential because it offered a general theory of dependency resolution which could be made precise by reference to any particular theory of linguistic features. Both strands of thought reoriented thinking in the field away from models of working memory that required serial search procedures and, generally, the discovery of widespread interference effects has vindicated that shift. Much recent research has made progress in delineating what the representations are (Yadav et al. 2023, Keshev et al. 2025) and how they can be learned in an unsupervised manner (Ryu & Lewis 2021). Relatively unexplored is how to characterize the information that can be attended to simultaneously, sometimes called the “focus of attention” (Oberauer & Hein 2012). This is an important commitment of models like ACT-R and provides an attractive point of articulation to theories of locality or linguistic domains. In this talk, I will survey what we know (and don’t know) about the focus of attention in language processing (Wagers & McElree 2013, 2022) and relate it to recent thinking about the dynamics of context encoding (Healey, Long & Kahana 2019; Balachandran, Wagers & Rich 2025).

After the colloquium, students and faculty took a walk down by the ocean at the Coastal Sciences Campus, where a pod of whales was spotted, as well as at least one otter (photo courtesy of Jungu Kang).

Linguistics faculty and students gathered together last Friday afternoon for the first colloquium of the year, given by Professor Emeritus Jim McCloskey. In a talk entitled “Clauses without Verbs: The Irish Landscape and Beyond,” Jim argued that Irish clauses instantiate one of two basic shapes, one more familiar and another less so. In the latter, a predicate — often something other than a verb — can appear with some, but not all of the regular functional structure of a clause. The talk provided a detailed investigation of a less studied clause type in Irish, and invites re-examination of so-called copular clauses in other languages. The talk was followed by a lively question and answer period, and later that evening a potluck at Ivy’s house.