A variety of frequency metrics have been proposed and applied to explain both processing phenomena and linguistic variation and change, some more complex than others. The goal of this workshop is to determine where the psycholinguistic perspective and the sociolinguistic perspective on frequency metrics converge and where they diverge, and whether the linguistic subdisciplines would benefit from a more uniform understanding of frequency.

Workshop programme:

30 July 2015:

Didactic sessions
9:00–9:30 Registration / welcome
9:30–11:00 Stefan Frank (Radboud University): Large-scale neural networks for cognitive modelling of sentence comprehension
11:00–11:15 Coffee
11:15–12:45 John Nerbonne (University of Groningen): Understanding Frequencies in Language Variation
12:45–14:15 Lunch
14:15–15:45 Michael Ramscar (University of Tübingen): Frequency of what, exactly? Linguistic metrics and the discriminative stance
15:45–16:00 Coffee

Student presentations
16:00–16:30 Martijn Bentum (Radboud University): How do speech registers differ in conditional word predictability?
16:30–17:00 Nemanja Vaci (University of Klagenfurt): Word frequency effects as contextual entropy
17:00–17:30 Oscar Strik (University of Groningen): The role of frequency in analogical change

20:00 Workshop Dinner (Pizzeria ‘La Piazza’, Rathausgasse 50)

31 July 2015:

Research talks
10:00–11:00 Stefan Frank: The role of language statistics in brain activation during sentence comprehension
11:00–11:15 Coffee
11:15–12:15 John Nerbonne: The importance of (in)frequencies in studying language variation
12:15–13:45 Lunch
13:45–14:45 Michael Ramscar: Explorations in discrimination learning and language
14:45–15:00 Coffee
15:00–16:00 Discussion

Organisers:

Luke Bradley
Ana Estrada
Emiel van den Hoven