26th January 2026 12:20 PM

Phonetics Lab Meeting

We'll discuss Sections I-III of the paper  "The myth of categorical perception" by Dr. Bob McMurray, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 152, 3819–3842 (2022),  https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0016614.  Dr. McMurray is the F. Wendell Miller Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa. 

Pay special attention to the distinction between "categorical perception" and "categorization"

Abstract:

Categorical perception (CP) is likely the single finding from speech perception with the biggest impact on cognitive science. However, within speech perception, it is widely known to be an artifact of task demands. CP is empirically defined as a relationship between phoneme identification and discrimination.

As discrimination tasks do not appear to require categorization, this was thought to support the claim that listeners perceive speech solely in terms of linguistic categories.

However, 50 years of work using discrimination tasks, priming, the visual world paradigm, and event related potentials has rejected the strongest forms of CP and provided little strong evidence for any form of it.

This paper reviews the origins and impact of this scientific meme and the work challenging it. It discusses work showing that the encoding of auditory input is largely continuous, not categorical, and describes the modern theoretical synthesis in which listeners preserve fine-grained detail to enable more flexible processing. This synthesis is fundamentally inconsistent with CP.

This leads to a different understanding of how to use and interpret the most basic paradigms in speech perception—phoneme identification along a continuum—and has implications for understanding language and hearing disorders, development, and multilingualism.

28th January 2026 12:20 PM

Phonetics Lab Meeting

We'll continue our discussion of the McMurray paper. 

6th February 2026 03:00 PM

Cornell Spring Cognitive Science Colloquium: Mouse Songs & Squeaks: A Windows into Brain circuits for Vocal Communication

This is not a P-Lab lecture, but the topic is of interest to ongoing Linguistics research.

The Cornell Cognitive Science Colloquium presents Cornell's Dr. Katherine Tschida, Assistant Professor of Psychology.  She will give a talk titled: 

Mouse songs and squeaks: a window into brain circuits for vocal communication.

Abstract:

To communicate successfully, both humans and non-human animals must vocalize in the right way and at the right time according to behavioral context.

Mice offer a unique opportunity to study the brain circuits that regulate the context-dependent control of vocal communication, because they offer an unparalleled toolkit of viral-genetic strategies to study defined populations of neurons and because they produce a rich repertoire of vocalization types.

I will present published and ongoing work aimed at characterizing the brain circuits that regulate mouse vocal communication across different behavioral contexts and across development.  

6th February 2026 04:30 PM

Classics Speaker Series - presents Sylvia Ferra: Where does writing come from? Inventing and deciphering ancient scripts

This is a talk from the Classics department, which may be of interest to linguists.

The Cornell Classics Speaker Series presents Dr. Silvia Ferrara, Pprofessor of Classic Philology and Italian Studies, University of Bologna, Italy who will give a talk titled:

Where does writing come from?  Inventing and deciphering ancient scripts. 

Abstract:

The invention of writing is an opaque phenomenon, as are all origins, as are all things remote and detached from the present, embedded in the deepest recesses of time. 

To understand how it was born we must go back more than 5000 years, and travel thousands of kilometers between China, Mesopotamia, Egypt and the Mayan civilizations, and end our journey on Easter Island, where a writing system seems to have been invented from zero.

But not even that is enough, we have to go even further back in time, to understand how the first signs were created, and how these tell us about our imagination, our visual perception and the relationship with what surrounds us.

Writing is not only the greatest invention in the world, but also a kaleidoscope to understand it and to better understand ourselves. However, there are still ancient scripts that we cannot read and decipher, and we will discover how state-of-the-art research can solve these problems and by doing so, reconstruct the history of the written word, globally.