Modeling Language Variation

Harvard FAS

Modeling Language VariationWhat do patterns of language variation tell us about the way humans learn and use language and represent it in the mind? In this course, students encounter a series of puzzles relating to quantitative patterns of language variation and develop the tools to characterize and model these patterns. Along the way, students learn about the various types of distributions that linguistic data can take, frequentist and Bayesian approaches to statistical inference, how to…