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NewsRelease
For Immediate Release:
January 4, 2006
Inventing languages in the laboratory
NEW HAVEN, CT--You are locked into a room and must find a stranger who is looking for you. You can communicate with the stranger via computer but you can not use letters or any other commonly used symbol. What do you  do? Simple: you invent a language. This is what many people do in Bruno Galantucci's laboratory at Haskins Laboratories, demonstrating that communication can arise without any pre-established agreement on the signs to be used and on their meaning. These invented languages offer new insights about the nature of human communication. For example, they show how signs are deeply rooted in the fabric of human cooperative action. At the same time, they demonstrate that the hallmarks of human natural languages, for example the use of few arbitrary units that combine with one another, arise fairly quickly in symbolic interactions.
The work will improve communication and collaboration between people and machines and also improve understanding of how humans produce and perceive speech. The work brings together a team of experts in speech processing, acoustic phonetics, prosody, gestural phonology, statistical pattern matching, language modeling, and speech perception, with faculty across engineering, computer science and linguistics. The project will develop a set of databases and tools that will be disseminated to serve the research and education community at large.
Haskins Laboratories was founded in 1935 by the late Dr. Caryl P. Haskins. This independent research institute has been in New Haven, Connecticut since 1970 when it formalized affiliations with Yale University and the University of Connecticut. The Laboratories' primary research focus is on the science of the spoken and written word.
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