Colin Bannard

Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
D-04103 Leipzig
Germany

phone:	0049 (0) 341 3550 423
fax:	0049 (0) 341 3550 444
email:	colin.bannardeva.mpg.de
personal homepage:	http://email.eva.mpg.de/~bannard/

Research interests:

• Understanding and modelling productivity in children's early multi-word speech.
• How children's knowledge of language and its relation to objects and events in the world is similar to or different from their knowledge of other contingencies, and their understanding of the social status of linguistic forms.
• When children draw inferences about the goals of others in learning and understanding words and constructions, and computationally explicit models of how they are able to do so.
• Non-productive/formulaic language use by children and adults and the factors that influence it e.g. item-specific learning, speaker/hearer economy, processing efficiency, communicative objectives.
• The place of utility-based and economic notions in understanding communication and its development.
• Statistical learning and inference.
• Data structures and algorithms for exploiting large text collections in linguistic research and for building natural language technologies.

For more information and publications please see my personal Homepage