September 22 HLP Lab Meeting

This lab meeting will focus on the domain-specific/domain-general distinction in cognitive science (and particularly in psycholinguistics). One of the goals of psycholinguistic research (especially at places like Rochester) is to account for phenomena in language production, language comprehension and, to a lesser extent, linguistic structure in terms of domain-general mechanisms (e.g. general statistical learning mechanisms, working memory, attention, whatever). The point of this lab meeting is to scrutinize the notion of a domain-general mechanism. I have two questions, but of course you are free to derail the discussion: (1) does it make sense to think that such things as domain-general mechanisms exist?, and (2) what does the existence or non-existence of a domain-general mechanism entail?

We will be joined by the preeminent psycholinguist Mohinish Shukla (University of Rochester), who will help lead the discussion of his paper:

Domain specificity and statistical computations in segmenting fluent speech attachment:Shukla_final_UBCWPL.pdf

Please also read this book chapter:

The Replacement of General-Purpose Learning Models with Adaptively Specialized Learning Modules attachment:Gallistel1999GazzanigaNoGeneralLearning.pdf