Episode 6 [Unedited]

What this episode covers

This is episode is the full, unedited interview with Ted Gibson. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, we strongly encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined. EPISODE CREDITS Guest Starring Ted Gibson , Professor of Cognitive Science at MIT’s TedLab Produced & Hosted by Adam Greenfield Executive Produced by Patrick Yurick , Instructional Designer – MIT OGE Executive Produced by Heather Konar, Communication Director – MIT OGE Special thanks to the following editors who provided us invaluable feedback that aided in the development of this show: Christopher O’Keeffe , Co-Founder of Podcation Kristy Bennet , Manager – MIT Women’s League Jennifer Cherone , Phd Candidate – MIT Burge Laboratory Erik Tillman , Phd, Formerly of the Kim Lab & Currently A Fellow at Vida Ventures, LLC The Great Communicators Podcast is a part of Gradcommx. Gradcommx, targeted at enhancing research communication, is the first offering of Gradx – a professional development project created for the graduate student population at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by the Office For Graduate Education. MUSIC & SOUNDS “Divider” by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under Attribution 4.0 International License (http://freemusicarchive.org) EPISODE SCRIPT Print The Script Here ADAM GREENFIELD Hello, Adam Greenfield here, host of The Great Communicators podcast series. What you’re about to hear is the full, unedited interview with one of the guests we spoke with. If you haven’t listened to the fully produced episode yet, I definitely encourage you to do so before listening to this one. They’re shorter in length and much more refined. You can find them all at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts. The idea behind these longer, unedited conversation is to give you an opportunity to hear the entire talk, warts and all. This is not only a fun way to hear the full flow of the conversation but it also emphasizes the importance of the points made in the shorter, produced episodes, which again, can be found at gradx.mit.edu/podcasts. Thanks for listening and enjoy the conversation. Patrick Yurick: So, we are going to start with, can you tell me your name and what you do here at MIT? Ted Gibson: My name is Ted Gibson, and I am a professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department. I am a professor of cognitive science here at MIT. P: Are there some things that you are working on? T: I work on human language, how people understand, produce, and represent human language. I work on why language is the way it is. I’m looking at evolutionary models of why human language looks the way it is, but we look at how language is today to try to get it at that. So, we look many languages corpuses, like some big texts of many, many languages to try and figure out why words look the way they do, why word order looks the way it does across as many languages as we can try to make inferences about what is natural about human language. That is mostly what I do. That is kind of half of what I do, actually. The other half is, I work with remote cultures to try and also understand language and cognition, cognition more broadly because if you want to, I am telling you too much here, but, what I am interested in is why human language,

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