Event Details

This event is co-organised by the Multilingualism and Cognition Research Group, the Heritage Language 2 Consortium (HL2C), and UiT’s Center for Language, Brain and Learning (C/LaBL) Brain Domain.

We are honoured to welcome Professor Morten H. Christiansen (Cornell University & Aarhus University) as our first invited speaker of the year.

Talk title: Squeezing through the Bottleneck: The Importance of Chunking in Language Learning

Abstract

Language happens in the here-and-now. During normal linguistic interaction, we are faced with an immense challenge by the combined effects of rapid input, short-lived sensory memory, and severely limited sequence memory. How then can the brain successfully handle the continual deluge of linguistic input? I argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must incrementally compress and recode the linguistic input as rapidly as possible before it is gone. As a consequence, incoming language incrementally gets recoded into chunks at increasingly more abstract levels of linguistic representation, from phonemes and syllables to multiword sequences and beyond. To illustrate, I present results from statistical learning, psycholinguistic experiments, and Large Language Models, highlighting the key role of chunking in first- and second-language learning.

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