Events

How do people decide whether a sentence “sounds right” in their native language by judging its syntactic well-formedness independently of meaning? Sentence acceptability judgments reflect not only the speaker's grammatical knowledge but also performance factors including information packaging and processing ease. In this talk, I review what we know about the interaction of these factors, including striking cases of “grammatical illusions” and situations where speakers hesitate or cannot reach a clear judgment when these factors conflict. I then present recent experimental evidence showing that speakers use rating scales strategically whereby scale extremes serve as categorical anchors while the midpoint marks maximal uncertainty. These findings highlight sentence evaluation as a dynamic calibration process and shed new light on how people make linguistic decisions under uncertainty

Various animal species can engage in socio-communicative interactions with humans, yet the factors that promote such behaviours remain under debate. Domestication, socialization, and species-specific predispositions may all play a role. To better understand how human–animal communication is shaped, it is essential to compare different species kept in similar conditions However, adopting a comparative approach when studying non-human animals, presents several challenges. Researchers must account not only for species-specific sensory and motor differences, but also for animals’ domestication history, motivational tendencies, and ecological background. Designing tasks that are truly comparable across species is particularly complex, raising questions such as whether experimental procedures should be standardized or not. In this seminar, I will address these issues and open a space for debate around the topic, by presenting a series of studies directly comparing the humanoriented communicative abilities of two domestic species—companion dogs and companion pigs— where our aim was to explore the factors that may shape emergence of such abilities

Giovanni Parmigiani is an Italian statistician with degrees from Bocconi University (B.S.) and Carnegie Mellon University (M.S., Ph.D.). He is Professor of Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and in the Department of Data Science at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. His work focuses on statistical methods in cancer genomics, contributing to a deeper understanding of inherited cancer risks and supporting informed decisionmaking