Chara Tsoukala will defend her thesis on Wednesday 21st of April 2021

15 April 2021
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On Wednesday 21st April 2021, at 14.30, Chara Tsoukala will defend her thesis entitled "Bilingual sentence production and code-switching: Neural network simulations''. Due to the restrictions surrounding the COVID-19 outbreak, and the corresponding limitations regarding number of guests allowed in the Academiezaal, the event will be accessible via live-stream. As with all defences, it is a public event and everybody is welcome to join online.

Link to live-stream

When multilingual speakers interact, they sometimes alternate between their languages in a single conversation context (for instance, in a single sentence). This is called code-switching, and it is done by many people who speak more than one language, not only by people who grew up in bilingual communities; it is an important aspect of human language.

In this thesis, Chara Tsoukala worked on a computational cognitive model of sentence production to simulate code-switching, with the goal to explore this phenomenon. She showed that Artificial Neural Networks are a useful and novel method to research bilingualism and code-switching. The computational model learned to code-switch without exposure to code-switched sentences, which indicates that part of code-switching (both in the model and among humans) occurs because of the (distribution of the) languages that are being used, and not only due to community-based influence.

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