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<div class="elementToProof"><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);">Dear All, </span></div>
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<div style="direction: ltr; text-align: left; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);"><br>
</span></div>
<div style="direction: ltr; text-align: left; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);">The CEU Department of Cognitive Science invites you to the following
talk:</span></div>
<div style="direction: ltr; text-align: left; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);"><b>Please note that this event will be held at CEU Budapest site!</b></span></div>
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</b></span></div>
<div style="direction: ltr; text-align: left; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);">Speaker: </span><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);"><b>Damian
Blasi (Harvard University)</b></span></div>
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<div style="direction: ltr; text-align: left; margin: 0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);"><b>Language diversity from individual-level biases</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);">In this talk I’ll critically revisit the idea that individual-level biases shape language diversity. The idea is straightforward:
the distribution of language structures in the world approximately follows the marginal payoff they provide to humans, in the form of ease of production, learnability, expressivity, and the like. I will discuss a number of cases from across linguistic domains
but will ultimately focus on the role of learnability (as evidenced in individual-level experiments). In this regard there are multiple related hypotheses, including the notions that language structures which are (1) easier to acquire by children, (2) easier
to acquire by adults and (3) easier to retain by adults, are overrepresented across the world’s languages. The main evidence I’ll use is the history and the nature of languages which instantiate almost ideal case studies for each of the hypotheses described
above, accordingly: (1) Creole languages (Blasi, Michaelis & Haspelmath 2017 <i>Nat Hum Beh</i>), (2) languages spoken by large populations (Scherbakova et al. to appear in <i>Sci Adv</i>), and (3) surviving languages (i.e. languages that are no longer transmitted
to newer generations, Blasi et al. in prep). I will conclude that the evidence for a direct pipeline between individual-level biases and social-level language structures is surprisingly less robust than widely assumed across the cognitive and language sciences,
and I will discuss some future research directions.</span></p>
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<span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);">Date: Wednesday, Dec 6, 2023</span></p>
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<span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);">Time: 4 PM (to 5:30 PM) CET</span></p>
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<span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);">Venue:</span><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);"><b> CEU
BUDAPEST site (1051 Budapest, Nádor u. 15.) N13 room 118.*</b></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);">and </span><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);"><b>Zoom</b></span><span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);"> (meeting
ID: <a href="https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97786728334?pwd=SXpVTkM2eFJsTUZTQU96dVVVTzFwZz09" target="_blank" id="OWA587cd14d-8162-12f8-f9ee-fc2b5efc5875" class="x_OWAAutoLink" title="https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97786728334?pwd=SXpVTkM2eFJsTUZTQU96dVVVTzFwZz09" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-auth="NotApplicable" data-loopstyle="linkonly" data-linkindex="0" style="margin: 0px;">977
8672 8334</a>, passcode: 425757)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);">Chair: Eva Wittenberg</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: normal; font-family: "Open Sans", sans-serif; font-size: 16px; color: rgb(33, 37, 41);"><b>*<i>Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Budapest <u>must RSVP</u> to vargai@ceu.edu to get access to the lecture
hall.</i></b></span></p>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><b>Eva Wittenberg</b></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;"><a href="http://lcl.ceu.edu" title="lcl.ceu.edu">lcl.ceu.edu</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Department of Cognitive Science</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Central European University</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Quellenstr. 51, 1100 Wien, Austria</span></div>
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