Temporal Chunks

Speaker:
Paul Cohen

Abstract:

I will focus on the organizing principles of chunks,the formal relationships that hold among elements of chunks and distinguish chunks from non-chunks. I will be examining temporal chunks, or configurations of elements that "go together" in time. I will discuss algorithms for learning flat and hierarchically-structured temporal chunks. An algorithm for learning flat chunks performs perfectly on the stimuli used to test segmentation in human infants and cotton-top tamarins. Hierarchically-structured chunks, on the other hand, though learnable by a simple algorithm, are perhaps not learnable by tamarins, given the trouble they seem to have with trivial phrase structure grammars.