Terry Regier, Ph.D. I am interested in semantic systems and the forces that constrain them. Languages vary in the categorization schemes they impose on the world, and this leads naturally to the question of whether there are any limits to the variation. Are there constraints either in the language user, or in the environment, that hem in the set of potential human semantic systems? If so, what are these constraints, and what is their source? These questions form the central focus of my research. Much of my work is computational in nature, bringing connectionist models of semantic constraints in contact with empirical data.
Contact
Information:
I am interested in the relation of language and thought. Different languages carve up the world in different ways - thus, some aspects of meaning are fashioned by the particulars of a specific language. But behind this cross-linguistic variation, there often also lie broad universal tendencies, that constrain the set of potential human semantic systems. I explore the interaction of universal constraints and language-specific forces, in the construction of linguistic meaning. Much of my work is computational in nature, testing models of word meaning on psychological and linguistic data.
Regier, T. (2003). Emergent constrainsts on word-learning: A computational review. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 7, 263-268. Kay, P. and Regier, T. (2003). Resolving the question of color naming universals. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 100(15), 9085-9089. Regier, T. and Zheng, M. (2003). An attentional constraint on spatial meaning. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Regier, T. (2003). Constraining computational models of cognition. In L. Nadel (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (pp. 611-615). London: Macmillan. Regier, T. and Carlson, L. (2002). Spatial language: Perceptual constraints and linguistic variation. In N. Stein, P. Bauer, and M. Rabinowitz (Eds.), Representation, Memory, and Development: Essays in Honor of Jean Mandler (pp. 199-221). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Regier, T. and Carlson, L. (2001). Grounding spatial language in perception: An empirical and computational investigation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 273-298. Regier, T., Corrigan, B., Cabasaan, R., Woodward, A., Gasser, M., and Smith, L. (2001). The emergence of words. In J. Moore and K. Stenning (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 815-820). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Crawford, E., Regier, T., and Huttenlocher, J. (2000). Linguistic and non-linguistic spatial categorization. Cognition, 75, 209-235.
Selected Courses Psychology 387: Connectionist Modeling Psychology 344/Mathematics 344: Computational Neuroscience III: Language The Mind: Language and Meaning
|
