Position: PhD Student Office: Room 501,Birkbeck, Malet Street, Bloomsburry, London WC1E 7HX Phone: +4420 7631 6214, +44(0)7925696046 Fax: Email: tkaram01@students.bbk.ac.uk , themkar@gmail.com

About

I am interested in Connectionism (or Artificial Neural Networks modelling), and its application in investigating atypical language development. Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is a developmental disorder with a greatly heterogeneous profile. Behavioural studies of SLI report a wide range of deficits in language use and learning (deficits in phonology, morphology, grammar, syntax, semantics or pragmatics).

Although the cognitive profile of SLI has been extensively studied, there is still no widely accepted account for the aetiology of the impairment. For some researchers, SLI stems from a deficit in the brain systems involved in the processing of language (language-specific deficit). For others, SLI should be attributed to a perceptual deficit (not language-specific), or general processing limitations.

Under the supervision of Dr. Michael Thomas, I work towards the development of a series of connectionist models for different aspects of language processing (phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics). I seek parameter settings under which such models could demonstrate performance and error patterns characteristic of typical development and SLI. Using this connectionist framework, my project aims to capture the variability of deficits in SLI, also adopting a crosslinguistic perspective. A second aim is to link the manipulations of the parameter settings which "simulate" aspects of the SLI profile, to theoretical accounts of SLI. A more detailed version of my research proposal can be found here.

Publications

Will appear here shortly.

Presentations/Talks

A connectionist model of English inflectional morphology. Talk presented in the 2008 Alston Child Language Meeting, May 8-10, Alston, UK. ( *.pptx)

Education/Background

I hold a Diploma in Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, Greece (1999). For several years, I have been working as a teacher of Informatics for the Greek Secondary Education. During 2006-2007, I followed an MSc in Cognitive Science (Neural Computation & Neuroinformatics/ Natural Language Processing) in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. I started my PhD in Birkbeck in September 2007.

Links

Cognitive Science at Edinburgh

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY) and the Greek Ministry of Education (YPEPTH) for funding my studies.