My PhD research

In my PhD thesis Segmentation, rule formation, and the emergence of generalisation, I used behavioural experiments and computational models to study

  • how people segment linguistic material (see Pankratz et al., 2024!),
  • how they learn rules from it,
  • how they generalise those rules to novel instances,

and how those processes might shape language.

My PhD research was funded by the Scottish Graduate School of Social Science and by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Journal papers

Pankratz, E., Kirby, S., & Culbertson, J. (2024). Evaluating the relative importance of wordhood cues using statistical learning. Cognitive Science, 48(3), e13429.

Pescuma, V. N., Serova, D., Lukassek, J., Sauermann, A., Schäfer, R., Adli, A., Bildhauer, F., Egg, M., Hülk, K., Ito, A., Jannedy, S., Kordoni, V., Kuehnast, M., Kutscher, S., Lange, R., Lehmann, N., Liu, M., Lütke, B., Maquate, K., Mooshammer, C., Mortezapour, V., Müller, S., Norde, M., Pankratz, E., …, Knoeferle, P. (2023). Situating language register across the ages, languages, modalities, and cultural aspects: Evidence from complementary methods. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. 1–31.

Pankratz, E., Arppe, A. & Lachler, J. (2022). Low hanging fruit and the Boasian trilogy in digital lexicography of morphologically rich languages: Lessons from a survey of Indigenous language resources in Canada. Nordlyd 46(1). 193–204.

Pankratz, E., & van Tiel, B. (2021). The role of relevance for scalar diversity: A usage-based approach. Language and Cognition 13(4). 562–594.

van Tiel, B. & Pankratz, E. (2021). Adjectival polarity and the processing of scalar inferences. Glossa 6(1). 32. 1–21.

van Tiel, B., Pankratz, E. & Sun, C. (2019). Scales and scalarity: Processing scalar inferences. Journal of Memory and Language 105. 93–107.

Schäfer, R. & Pankratz, E. (2018). The plural interpretability of German linking elements. Morphology 28(4). 325–358.

Conference proceedings

Pankratz, E., Kirby, S., & Culbertson, J. (2024). The key property of frequency distributions that facilitates linguistic rule generalisation is long-tailedness. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 6433.

Pankratz, E., Kirby, S., & Culbertson, J. (2024). Why are languages skewed? A Bayesian account for how skew and type count, but not entropy, facilitate rule generalisation. Proceedings of Evolang XV, 1–3.

Keogh, A., Pankratz, E., Kirby, S., & Culbertson, J. (2023). Does production facilitate learning morphosyntactic generalisations? Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 45, 3919.

Pankratz, E., Yadav, H., Smith, G., & Vasishth, S. (2021). Statistical properties of the speed-accuracy trade-off (SAT) paradigm in sentence processing. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43, 2176–2182.

Pankratz, E. (2021). qxoRef 1.0: A coreference corpus and mention-pair baseline for coreference resolution in Conchucos Quechua. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas (AmericasNLP-NAACL 2021), 1–9.

van Tiel, B., Pankratz, E., Marty, P. & Sun, C. (2019). Scalar inferences and cognitive load. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 23, 427–441.

Lachler, J. & Pankratz, E. (2017). Moving towards value-added digital repatriation in lexicography for Indigenous languages in Canada. Proceedings of the 21st FEL Conference: Communities in Control: Learning tools and strategies for multilingual endangered language communities, 107–114.