Thomas Can't Into Cognitive Modelling

This week I got to present at CMCL 2014, a workshop on computational models of language-related cognition, i.e. processing, acquisition, discourse representation, and so on. My talk was about the connection between Stabler's top-down parser for Minimalist grammars and the processing of relative clauses, something I've been working on for a while now with Bradley Marcinek, a student of mine. Thanks to Greg Kobele, John Hale and Sabrina Gerth, we already know that the predictions of this parser depend on one's syntactic analysis in interesting ways, so we wanted to extend their line of work to some other well-known phenomena. Long story short, our results are rather messy and it will be a while until we can get this idea truly off the ground.

That is why I won't blog about this research quite yet (except for the shameless self-promotion above) and instead focus on the talks I heard, rather than the one I gave. Don't get me wrong, many of them were very interesting to me on a technical level; some of them even pierced my 90s habitus of acerbic cynicism and got me a bit excited. Quite generally, a fun time was had by all. But the talks made me aware of a gapping hole in my understanding of the field, a hole that one of you (I believe we have some readers with serious modelling chops) may be able to plug for me: Just what is the point of cognitive modelling?