Research
Spoken language is the behavior that most distinguishes Homo sapiens from other animals. The language faculty emerged recently in the Homo line, probably within the last 150,000 years. What were the neural, physiological and cultural bases that drove its emergence? Once the language faculty had emerged, how did it come to diffuse across the entire globe? What factors now drive the extant languages of the world to interact with each other and change? How are humans able to process speech so efficiently? Can knowledge of the human language faculty help us to enhance the ability of computers to recognize and process speech?
The Language Engineering Laboratory aims to better understand each of these issues. We approach these issues from a multi-disciplinary perspective, seeking to meld the latest theories from linguistics, cognitive science, anthropology and other empirical sciences with the latest modeling methods from engineering, computer science and mathematics.
Slide show introduction to research at the LEL