Optimality Theory
as a General Cognitive Architecture

Date and time: July 20, 9:00-12:30.

Location: White Hall Room (of the Boston Park Plaza Hotel).

Program:

9:00		Introduction (Judit Gervain and Tamas Biro)
9:10		Keynote address by Paul Smolensky (JHU): Parallel Distributed Symbol Processing: Well-formedness optimization and discretization in cognition (abstract)
9:55		Giorgio Magri (Institut Jean Nicod): A comparison between OT and HG from a computational perspective (abstract)
10:20		Poster session (see below), followed by coffee break
10:50		Petra Hendriks (U. of Groningen): Asymmetries between production and comprehension and the development of Theory of Mind (abstract)
11:15		Douglas M. Jones (U. of Utah): Linguistic grammar and moral grammar: The case of kinship (abstract)
11:40		Lotte Hogeweg (RU Nijmegen): Optimality Theory as a general linguistic theory (abstract)
12:05		Géraldine Legendre and Mary Schindler (JHU): Bilingualism and the optimizing of code-switching (abstract)

Posters in the poster session:

Stephen Goldberg and Ariel Goldberg: Constraint interaction in the inscription of Chinese characters (abstract)

Ann Irvine, Mark Dredze, Geraldine Legendre and Paul Smolensky: Optimality Theory syntax learnability: An empirical exploration of the perceptron and GLA (abstract)

Richard Mansell: Translation universals: Can Optimality Theory help? (abstract)

Nazarré Merchant: Using the fusional closure to assist in learning ranking information (abstract)

Clàudia Pons-Moll: From positional faithfulness to contextual markedness: Phylogenetic aspects of OT/HG approaches (abstract)

Igor Yanovich: The Logic of OT rankings (abstract)

Tamás Biró: Religious mental structures: Counterintuitiveness represented in Optimality Theory (poster and abstract)

Download the collection of the abstracts in pdf format here.