Colloquium: Tom Roeper

On Tuesday, April 16th, at 4pm in SH 0.104, Professor Tom Roeper (University of Massachusetts) will be giving a talk in the GK colloquium.

Title:

How abstract are real Mental Representations?
Searching for the right formulation of recursion in language and Math if they emerge together on the developmental path.

Abstract:

Recent work in Minimalism (Chomsky (2013)) has proposed definitions of recursion that are abstract: word order is captured by Externalization, and self-embedding by Indirect Recursion of abstract categories. These formulations can also capture both recursive adjective formation and the recursive indirect embedding of the 1-9 system among multipliers of ten, hundred and thousand.
Several new experiments in English and Chinese provide Initial evidence that there are empirical correlations in children between  4-7 years between these stages and the emergence of recursion in possessives and Adjective phrases up to four levels (big little big little boxes).