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So weird that English speakers used to say ‘uncles and aunts’ when obviously ‘aunts and uncles’ is so much more natural. What happened? with Crystal Lee, to appear in Frontiers: [pdf]

Who knew English has a Gossip Construction? Now you know [pdf]

Here is a response to that perspective piece Language is publishing on autism. co-authored with Kirsten Abbot-Smith and updated [pdf]

Congratulations to Sammy Floyd, Karina Tachihara and Crystal Lee for winning prestigious fellowships!  Sammy won a University Proctor fellowship awarded to only a very few Princeton graduate students across any department!  Karina won the William Orr Dingwall Foundation fellowship for her work on Language and Neuroscience!  And Crystal Lee is an NSF fellowship awardee!  

Congratulations to Robert Hawkins for winning the best computational paper on Language prize from the Cognitive Science Society for his paper, “Generalizing meanings from partners to populations: Hierarchical inference supports convention formation on networks.”

Delighted to be a part of the fabulous Abralin talk series!  Now on YouTube.  “Good Enough Language Production: children are both more conservative and more ready generalizers for the same reason” Organized by Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Cognitive Accessibility predicts word order of couples’ names in English and Japanese. 2020. Karina Tachihara & AEG. Cognitive Linguistics [pdf]

So, Neurotypical Children make use of relationships across meanings in word learning. S Floyd & AE Goldberg. 2020. JEP: L,M,&C. [pdf].  But children on the Autism spectrum don’t share the same learning advantage: Floyd, Jeppsen, & Goldberg, 2021,Children on the Autism spectrum are challenged by complex word meanings, Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. [pdf]

congratulations to Charlotte Jeppsen (’18, PSY), now in Bob McMurray’s fabulous PSY group at U of Iowa! Alexia Hernandez (’19, LIN), now in the top LIN department at Stanford! Ana Patricia Esquela (Princeton ’19, PSY), now in Human Growth and Development, U of Michigan!

Grateful to Remi van Trijp for his fantastic 13 minute film about our work!

Children make use of relationships across meanings in word learning. Sammy Floyd and Adele  E. Goldberg.  2020. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,  Memory and Cognition. [pdf]

Review of Explain Me This by Martin Hilpert (Jan 2020)

Review of Explain Me This by Remi van Trijp in Folio (Dec, 2019)

Merde! Citron finds that L2 speakers don’t display the increase in amygdala activation for metaphorical language the way native speakers do preprint

Caro Rowland (MPI, Nijmegen) to visit Feb 3rd (2:00 PSH 101)!

The Blowfish Effect: Children and Adults Use Atypical Exemplars to Infer More Narrow Categories during Word Learning. 2019. Lauren Emberson, Nicole Loncar, Carolyn Mazzei, Isaac Treves, and Adele E Goldberg. Journal of Child Language.

Goldberg had an incredible time at the LSA’s Linguistic Institute at UC Davis, honored to be this year’s Fillmore professor.   This was her 7th time teaching and one of the most fun!    Some 60-70 great students attended her lectures.  She got to attend Comrie’s, Ferriera’s, Corina’s, and Barreda’s, and would have liked to attend the 56 other courses offered as well!  Great talks in the evenings by Baugh, Goldsmith and many others.  Weekend workshops, old and new friends, funky town, and fish tacos galore. Linguistic Institutes are the best. 

Fabulous Cogsci conference in Montreal July 2019, find our lab’s 3 papers and 2 posters under Latest Findings.

Pulling the Plug on Some Criticisms on Argument Structure Constructions
Mon Feb 25
Remi van Trijp
Sony Computer Science Laboratories Paris
remi.vantrijp@sony.com

Critical periods in language, cognitive development, and massive online experiments
Thurs Feb 28, 4:30 Peretsman-Scully Hall Langfeld Lounge 2nd floor
Josh Hartshorne
Psychology, Boston College

*****

Linguistic Society of America was just held in the greatest city in the world. Sammy Floyd (Polysemy) and Karina Tachihara (L2 and competition) gave outstanding talks; also Libby Barak presented a great poster (modeling of polysemy).  Many other great talks as well, with a special shout out to plenaries by Penny Eckert (sociolinguistics) and Jennifer Cole (prosody and meaning)!

Just back from the first MaCala Conference jointly sponsored by Penn State’s great Language Acquisition and Language Sciences departments!

Picture from BabyLab party at Casey’s!  

Goldberg to give plenary at the 4th Usage-Based Linguistics Conference in Tel Aviv, July 1-3.

2017-2018

Graduation day yesterday at Princeton.  Congratulations to Jessie Schwab on her PhD!  To Sarah Reid and Charlotte Jeppson on their undergrad degrees! Also congratulations to Charlotte for winning the departmental prize in clinical work for her project on Polysemy learning in children with ASD (with Sammy Floyd), and to Jessie for her university and departmental teaching awards!   Congratulations to Rebecca Blevins for winning a junior Howard Crosby Prize! Really heart-warming to see these and many other former wonderful students graduate, ready to take the world by storm!

Congratulations to Libby Barak on organizing the first and second workshops aimed at encouraging women & URMs in the field of Natural Language Processing: WiNLP.   It’s held  as part of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) conference and was in Vancouver last year and New Orleans this year:  http://www.winlp.org/winlp-workshop/.

Sammy Floyd and Libby Barak presented a poster on Modeling Differences in the Acquisition of Polysemy and Ambiguity at WiNLP.

Goldberg awarded the Fillmore Professorship and will be teaching at the LSA’s Linguistic Institute in July 2019.

Get to Know Your Instructors: Adele Goldberg

Goldberg visited U of Oregon for Ling colloquium, April 26, 2018.  Wonderful department there, with special shout out to Spike Gildea’s music and party.

EVOLANG in Toruń, Poland. April 16-20, 2018 (Goldberg gave plenary: “Children tend to regularize and are conservative for the same reasons” (Chapter 6 of Explain me This!). Fascinating talks by Jerome Lewis, Karen Emmorey, Wendy Sadler (in memory of Irit Meir), Chris Knight, Jenny & Kenny and their many Edinburgh students. Kudos to the organizers, Slawomir Wacewicz, Zywiczynski, Przemyslaw!

Crystal Lee (Rochester BCS ’18)  is coming as a grad student in 2019 to  the BabyLab and Language lab, after a fellowship at the MPI in Nijmegen working with Caroline Rowland!

Another excellent CUNY sentence processing conference (this time in Davis, CA).  Highlights included Marta Kutas (UCSD!) on her groundbreaking ERP work and Andrea Martin (MPI) and Ellen Lau (UMD) on exciting future directions for  ERP/EEG work.  Also super cool work on how the brain tracks referents as they change over time from Gerry Altmann’s lab.

Karina Tachihara presented a poster, “L2 speakers know what they’ve heard, but they don’t take competing alternatives into account the way native speakers do” at CUNY, March, 2018.

Jayden Ziegler (Harvard; Princeton ’14) presented a poster “Locative priming of passives is due to shared BY” (JZ, AEG, Jesse Snedeker) at CUNY,  March, 2018.

Laura Janda and Tore Nesset are visiting from University Tromsø!  Welcome Laura and Tore! Janda presents,  Are paradigms learnable? A view from Russian. Oct 6 1:00 in PSH 311.

Goldberg taught PSY/LIN 309, The Psychology of Language Fall ’17 (60 students).

Dinner at Adele’s in Nov.  Come as someone else:

Congratulations to Amy Freyberger for her exceptional senior thesis evaluating the SiLOS social cognition software for children with ASD. And a shout out to Chris Dudick and Bernie Mullen for developing the software.

Highly recommend Pim Levelt’s History of Psycholinguistics for an enlightening, engaging overview of our field.  No, it did not begin in 1951 (or 1957 or 1965)–meet the great 18th and 19th Century minds who thought deeply about the psychology of language.

A regular afternoon in psychology at Princeton:

Fun retirement dinner for Edwin Williams at Luca’s restaurant in Summerset with Laura Kalin, Florian Lionnet, Christiane Fellbaum, and two cakes.

Spring ’17

Jessica Schwab presenting poster on children’s probability boosting in production but not comprehension and Carolyne MaazeI presenting poster on the Blowfish effect in children at SRCD!

Exciting week at Spring AAAI Symposium  on Computational Construction Grammar and NL Understanding. Libby Barak and Adele both presenting. March 27-29, Stanford.

Amazing CUNY conference organized by Ted Gibson at MIT.

Back from a collaboration in Erlangen, Germany with Prof. Thomas Herbst of Valency Theory,  sponsored by the Humboldt foundation.  Began work on Construction Fragments, and ITEMCX (items-in-constructions).

The book is taking shape: Explain me this: Creativity, Competition and the Partial Productivity of Constructions. Princeton University Press.

Goldberg will teach PSY 309, Psychology of Language.

Fall ’16

Fun and interesting visit to Google where I found many old friends and previous students. Yes, I took the slide.

Fabulous retirement party for George Lakoff in Berkeley!  Packed room, much laughter, a few tears, many testimonials about how George changed each of our lives, Haj Ross reminiscing about the early days of syntax.

Just back from an interesting workshop on verbs and argument structure at Boston College (organized by Josh Hartshorne). Oct 21st.

Goldberg to teach a freshman seminar, The Word. Tuesdays 1:30-4:20.

Summer ’16

Conventional metaphors in longer passages evoke affective brain response.  Just out in NeuroImage.

Spring ’16

Congratulations to psychology seniors Matthew Barouch, Jalisha Braxton, and Danielle Ellis, and to linguistic seniors Nick Tippenhauer and Ronan O’Brien on graduating!  And a special congratulations to Matthew for winning the George Miller prize in Cognitive Science for his publication-worthy senior thesis work!

4/6-7/16: Tanner Lectures at the Center for Human Values by Robert Boyd  (Culture Matters: the roots of human uniqueness).

Exciting talks by both Mike Frank  and Thalia Wheatley.

Wojciech Lewandowski, a postdoc in Copenhagen is visiting us for the next two months. Welcome Wojciech!

Goldberg is teaching PSY 309, Psychology of Language, using Julie Sedivy‘s exceptional new textbook, Language in Mind.

Great trip to LSA in DC.  Talks by Marianne Mithun, Jack DuBois, John Rickford, Betty Birner, and others made for a very interesting and fun weekend.

Goldberg awarded a Humboldt Research Award and spoke at the Humboldt Award ceremony in March in Bamberg, Germany.  Will be hosted by Thomas Herbst (Erlangen  University) and Friedemann Pulvermueller (Freie University)

Fall ’15

The University of Birmingham has made offers to both Florent Perek  and to Bodo Winter.

Just finalized a paper on anaphoric one (as in, this is a good one!) with dear friend Laura MIchaelis for a special issue of Cognitive Science devoted to last year’s Rumelhart Prize winner, Ray Jackendoff. [pdf]

Visit Bodo Winter’s new Data Goldmine website that contains information and links to hundreds of corpora and databases–incredibly useful:  http://languagegoldmine.com/

Very interesting new paper relating Schema Theory in music to construction grammar from Northwestern here.

Libby Barak will visit us from U of Toronto next year to work on modeling work.  Welcome Libby!

Summer ’15

Just returned from the fabulous Linguistic Institute at the University of Chicago, where  I got to teach 50+ wonderful graduate students and visiting scholars from all over the world and sit in on half a dozen great courses there.  Kudos to the organizers!

Goldberg is invited to visit Paris in 2016 for a series of lectures through the International Chair program: Empirical Foundations of Linguistics: data, methods, models.

Finished up a little review of Vyv Evans’ The Language Myth, requested by Language. [pdf]

Congratulations to undergrads Daisy Lopez for graduating with high honors and to Jessica Hao for graduating with highest honors! And also to Jessica for winning the George A. Miller prize in Cognitive Science!

Goldberg to serve on LSA’s Nominating Committee 2016-2019.  (which I believe means I get to nominate others to actually do things).

Neural systems involved in processing novel linguistic constructions and their visual referents. Matthew A. Johnson, Nick Turk-Browne, & AE Goldberg. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience.

Jessica Hao will be leaving our group after 4 years as an RA to attend medical school at Washington University. Congrats, Jess!

Stefan Gries (UCSB) taught an excellent week-long course on mixed model statistics in May.

Spring ’15

Goldberg is on sabbatical, working on a new book, Explain me this: how we learn what not to say. To be published by Princeton University Press.

Re: a-adjectives that resist appearing attributively (?? the afraid boy):  BoydGoldberg2011; Bruening’s blog;  response to Bruening;  Yang(2015);  Our reply to to Yang is here: pdf.

Judgment evidence for statistical preemption: It is relatively better to vanish than to disappear a rabbit, but a lifeguard can equally well backstroke or swim children to shore. C Robenalt & AE Goldberg.  2015, in Cognitive Linguistics.

Generalizing beyond the input: the functions of the constructions matter. F Perek & AE Goldberg.2015, in Journal of Memory and Language. 

Goldberg has joined fabulous Psychology Department at Princeton full time.

Introduction of Emergent Communication and Language Sciences group at Princeton.

Carol Madden Lombardi (CRNS) visit Jan ’15.

Florent Perek visit Jan ’15.

Fall ’14 

Michael Arbib (USC, CS) & Maria Pinango (Yale, LIN) visit Oct 23-24, 2014.

Goldberg taught LIN/PSY Language Acquisition course Fall ’14. TTh 11-12:30.

Workshop on language processing Oct 11-12, 2014.

ETS workshop on the Lexicon Oct 17-18.

Sweet!  Conventional taste metaphors activate gustatory and emotion brain areas more than carefully matched literal controls: (Citron & Goldberg, JoCN 2014)

Luc Steels  (VUB AI lab) visiting Sept 24, 2014

Casey Lew-Williams has joined the psychology faculty!  Casey!http://babylab.northwestern.edu/Language_Learning_Lab/Home.html

Spring ’14

Congratulations to David Abugaber for winning the extremely prestigious Gates Cambridge Fellowship AND an NSF fellowship. David will be heading to Cambridge after graduating to earn a masters in psycholinguistics.

We are very much enjoying having Florent Perek with us from Freiburg U., and Cotie Long from Indiana University.

We have moved to the new Peretsman-Scully (P-SY) building.   Goldberg’s office is #327.

Goldberg’s Einstein Fellowship from Berlin is renewed for another two years,  2013-2014!  The fellowship offers generous funding for travel from Princeton to Berlin for short-term stays, as well as a postdoc and student based at Freie U. in Berlin.

Appreciation goes to Haibu Wu for translating Constructions at Work into Chinese for Peking University Press (Dec, 2013).

Goldberg is elected a lifetime Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America 2014.