Michael Ramscar

"What Can We Do With 500 Billion Words?" Workshop

Ramscar Lab — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:01:27 +0000

Last week, Michael served as a workshop panelist at “What Can We Do With 500 Billion Words?”, a mini-conference that brought together linguists and learning theorists, organized by lab alum Melody Dye and Prof Colin Allen. His presentation is now available for download.

Opinion Piece in Frontiers

Ramscar Lab — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:21:19 +0000

Frontiers in Language Sciences has just published our commentary on the research topic “Does Language Production Shape Language Form and Comprehension?” introduced by Prof Maryellen MacDonald. You can find her original article and our reply online.

New Releases

Ramscar Lab — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 02:34:26 +0000

We are pleased to announce that four new articles are slated for release at Psych Science, Child Development, Language and Language and Speech. Uncorrected versions of the manuscripts have been made available through the Access Articles mainframe.

1. Error and expectation in language learning: The curious absence of ‘mouses’ in adult speech

2. Children value informativity over logic in word learning

3. Dual routes to cognitive flexibility: Learning and response conflict resolution in the DCCS task

4. Sidestepping the combinatorial explosion: Towards a processing model based on discriminative learning

NSF Fellowship Winners

Ramscar Lab — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 04:28:33 +0000

Congratulations to recent lab alumni and first year doctoral students Ariel James (U. Illinois), Justine Kao (Stanford) and Melody Dye (Indiana). This year, all three won highly prestigious National Science Foundation graduate fellowships in psychology. Melody and Justine were awarded fellowships in the cognitive area, while Ariel won in psycholinguistics.

Most Read Articles

Ramscar Lab — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:16:03 +0000

In 2011, “Learning language from the input” was one of Cognitive Psychology‘s twenty most read papers. It was in the top five for papers published that year. Read it here, or take a glance at the companion article, now in press at Language and Cognitive Processes.

Talks at LSA 2012

Ramscar Lab — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:48:20 +0000

Friday Morning Session, 11:00 a.m.: Psycholinguistics: Syntax/Discourse

Richard Futrell (Stanford University), Michael Ramscar (University of Tübingen): German grammatical gender contributes to communicative efficiency

Sunday Morning Session, 10:30 a.m.: Psycholinguistics Across Level

Inbal Arnon (University of Haifa), Michael Ramscar (University of Tübingen): Granularity and the acquisition of grammatical gender: How order-of-acquisition affects what gets learned (Cognition article available online)

Looking for the PLoS Paper on Number Learning?

Ramscar Lab — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 22:27:18 +0000

Looking for our award-winning PLoS One paper on how children learn numbers? In the last month, roughly half of Google searchers that stumbled onto this page were doing just that. We’ll save you the trouble of browsing further: find it here!

Number Research takes home CaSL Prize

Ramscar Lab — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 17:14:42 +0000

We are very excited to announce that the lab’s research into how children learn number has just taken home this year’s CaSL prize in Cognitive Science, which is sponsored by the Institute of Education Sciences, a part of the US Dept of Education. The prize is awarded to the best research “on a topic directly related to cognitive science, in the areas of educational practice, or subject-matter learning.” A final report of the findings has just been published in PLoS One. A press release is available in English and Spanish. Congratulations to co-authors Michael Ramscar, Melody Dye, Hanna Popick and Fiona O’Donnell-McCarthy!

Recent Output

Ramscar Lab — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 21:27:07 +0000

This year, five of the lab’s papers were accepted for presentation at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society in Boston. These include:

1. How children learn to value numbers: Information structure & the acquisition of numerical understanding
2. How pitch category learning comes at a cost to absolute frequency representations
3. Informativity versus logic: Children and adults take different approaches to word learning
4. Investigating how infants learn to search in the A-not-B task
5. Breaking the World into Symbols

In addition, two abstracts were accepted for presentation at the LSA Workshop “Information-theoretic Approaches to Linguistics.”

1. The Predictive Function of Prenominal Adjectives
2. German Grammatical Gender Manages Nominal Entropy

Thanks to all the hard work from contributing lab members – Richard Futrell, Hanna Popick, Adam November, Joseph Klein, Nikki Aguirre, Linda Diane Ruiz, Edward Suh, Lily Sadaat and Melody Dye!

Scientific American Mind: Why Johnny Can’t Name His Colors

Ramscar Lab — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 23:11:51 +0000

The May/June issue of Scientific American Mind features an article about the lab’s findings on how children learn to name colors, along with a quick trick for speeding their acquisition. The original “Mind Matters” post on the subject is also available at Scientific American.com, with a helpful comment-and-reply section by the author.