The Department of Linguistics Winter 2019 Colloquium Series continues February 1 with a presentation by Linguistics Professor and Chair William Idsardi of the University of Maryland. His areas of specialization are phonology, cognitive neuroscience, and psycholinguistics. All are welcome. Light refreshments will be served.

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).