The Department of Linguistics Winter 2019 Colloquium Series event on Friday, February 1, featured Linguistics Professor and Chair William Idsardi of the University of Maryland. He presented “Exploring the Phonological Continuity Hypothesis” at 4 p.m. in room B1570, Ross School of Business. 

ABSTRACT

Exploring the Phonological Continuity Hypothesis

Fitch (2018) proposes the Phonological Continuity Hypothesis, "humans share the processing capabilities required to deal with regular-level sequential processing, and thus phonology, with other animals, and these shared capabilities are implemented in homologous neural processing algorithms and circuitry." In this talk I will offer some different ways to understand the differences between sentence patterns and sound patterns (Heinz & Idsardi 2011, 2013; Idsardi 2018), and will review some recent work testing song sequence recognition in songbirds (Lawson et al 2018).