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What We Do

The research in the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Cornell University is conducted within a unified framework for understanding language across multiple time-scales: the time-scale of thousands of years, over which languages themselves evolve; the time-scale of years, over which children acquire the language of their community; and the time-scale of seconds, in which particular utterances are spoken and understood. We aim to produce a comprehensive account of language evolution, acquisition and processing based on evidence from a variety of methods, including neuroimaging, molecular genetics, eye-tracking, behavioral experiments, corpus analyses, and computational modeling as well as from different subject populations, ranging from infants to adults with and without language impairments.

News

Dr. Christiansen will be delivering a plenary talk at the 8th Evolution of Language Conference, Utrecht, The Netherlands, April 2010.

Dr. Christiansen will be giving the 2009 Nijmegen Lectures December 7-9 at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands.

Congrats to Jennifer Misyak for winning the Marr Prize for Best Student Paper at the 31st Annual Cognitive Science Society Conference, July/August 2009, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Dr. Christiansen was elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.

Upcoming Talks

J.B. Misyak, M.H. Christiansen & J.B. Tomblin: Statistical Learning Skill Predicts Language Performance: On-line Data from Nonadjacency Learning and Relative Clause Processing. Paper to be presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Boston, MA, November 21, 2009.

M.H. Christiansen: A Possible Division of Labor between Arbitrary and Systematic Sound-Meaning Mappings in Language. Invited talk to be presented at a workshop on “Sound Symbolism: Challenging the Arbitrariness of Language”, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, March 26-27, 2010.

M.H. Christiansen: Brains, Genes and Language Evolution: A New Synthesis. Invited colloquium to be presented to the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, March 24, 2010.

M.H. Christiansen: Brains, Genes and Language Evolution: A New Synthesis. Invited lecture at the Third Graduate Summer Institute in Cognitive Science: On the Origin of Language, Cognitive Science Institute, l'Université du Québec à Montréal, Québec, Canada, June 29, 2010.

Recent Papers

Beckner, C., Blythe, R., Bybee, J., Christiansen, M.H., Croft, W., Ellis, N., Holland, J., Ke, J., Larsen-Freeman, D. & Schoenemann, T. (in press). Language is a complex adaptive system. To appear in a special issue of Language Learning on "Language as a complex adaptive system".

Chater, N. & Christiansen, M.H. (in press). Language acquisition meets language evolution. Cognitive Science.

Christiansen, M.H. & MacDonald, M.C. (in press). A usage-based approach to recursion in sentence processing. Language Learning.

Misyak, J.B., Christiansen, M.H. & Tomblin, J.B. (in press). Sequential expectations: The role of prediction-based learning in language. Topics in Cognitive Science.

Cornell University