A bit about Fernand Gobet
I earned my Ph.D. in psychology in 1992 at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. After a six-year stay at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh, USA, where I collaborated with Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, I was Senior Research Fellow and then Reader at the University of Nottingham. I moved to Brunel University in 2003 to take up a Chair in cognitive psychology. Since 2013, I have been Professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Liverpool.
My research interests include the psychology of expertise and talent, computational modelling and the acquisition of language. I’m the main architect behind the CHREST project (Chunk Hierarchy and REtrieval STructures), one of the few cognitive architectures in the world. Beyond perception, memory and decision making in a number of games (chess, Go, awele and blackjack), CHREST has simulated data on concept formation, implicit learning, memory for computer programs and problem gambling. Variants of CHREST have successfully accounted for key phenomena in the acquisition of syntactic structures (in collaboration with Daniel Freudenthal and Julian Pine, LuCiD) and the acquisition of vocabulary (in collaboration with Gary Jones, Nottingham Trent University, and Julian Pine, LuCiD).
I have over 300 scientific publications, including seven books on expertise and computational modelling. My three latest books are Problem gambling: Cognition, prevention and treatment (2014), Understanding expertise: A multidisciplinary approach (2016) and The psychology of chess (2018). For more information please visit my CHREST profile page.
My Role in LuCiD
I lead a project building individualised models of language development. We will construct computational models that explain the performance of a subset of children from the 0-5 cohort at an individual level across a range of language tasks administered at different points in development.
In phase 1, I worked on Work Package 12, on developing a model of word class acquisition that can simulate developmental changes in productivity across languages, and on the Language 0-5 Project.
LuCiD publications (21) by Fernand Gobet
Freudenthal, D., Gobet, F. & Pine, J. M. (2023). MOSAIC+: a cross-linguistic model of verb-marking error in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder Language Learning
Pine, J. M., Freudenthal, D. & Gobet, F. (2023). Building a unified model of the Optional Infinitive Stage: Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of verb-marking error in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder. Journal of Child Language.1-17.
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M. & Bannard, C. (2022). Modelling Children’s Sentence Recall using an Encoder-Decoder Network. J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.) Proceedings of the 44th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2576-2582). Toronto, ON: Cognitive Science Society.
Pine, J. M., Freudenthal, D. & Gobet, F. (2020). Understanding the cross-linguistic pattern of verb-marking error in typically developing children and children with Developmental Language Disorder: Why the input matters. In C. F. Rowland, B. Ambridge, A. L. Theakston & K. E. Twomey (Eds.), Current perspectives on child language acquisition: How children use their environment to learn. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Noble, C., Sala, G., Peter, M., Lingwood, J., Rowland, C., Gobet, F. & Pine, J. M. (2019). The impact of shared book reading on children’s language skills: A meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 28, 100290.
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., & Gobet, F. (2019). Learning cross-linguistic word classes through developmental distributional analysis. In A. Goel, C. Seifert & C. Freska (Eds.), Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp.1773-1779). Montreal, QB: Cognitive Science Society.
Gobet, F. (2015). Vocabulary acquisition. In International encyclopaedia of the social & behavioural sciences, (ed. J. Wright) Vol25, 2nd edition: Elsevier, 226-231
Jones, G., Gobet, F., Freudenthal, D., Watson, S. E. & Pine, J. M. (2014). Why computational models are better than verbal theories: the case of nonword repetition. Developmental Science, 17(2) 298-310.
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J.M. & Gobet, F. (2017). Cross-linguistic learning of word classes from distributional information. Paper presented at the Third LuCiD Language and Communication Development Conference, Lancaster, UK.
Gobet, F. (2018). A Chunk is a Chunk is a Chunk. Talk at meeting La fête du chunk. Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France.
Gobet, F. (2018). Portée et limites du modèle CHREST. Rencontre interdisciplinaire: Chunking implicite et explicite. Marseille: Institut d’Etudes Avancées d’Aix-Marseille Université.
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., & Gobet, F. (2018). A computational model of the acquisition of German case. In T. T. Rogers, M. Rau, X. Zhu, & C. W. Kalish (Eds.), Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1687-1692). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Lloyd-Kelly, M., Gobet, F. & Lane, P. (2015). Be-Bop-A-Lula: A CHREST model of infant word segmentation. Poster presented at the Fifth Implicit Learning Seminar, Lancaster University. Lancaster: UK.
Gobet, F. (2017). Entrenchment, Gestalt formation and chunking. In H.-J. Schmid (Ed.), Entrenchment, memory and automaticity. The psychology of linguistic knowledge and language learning (pp. 245-267). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.
Kangatharan, J., Uther, M. & Gobet, F. (2016). Native and non native listeners’ speech comprehension performance under adverse listening conditions. Proceedings of New Sounds Conference. Aarhus, Denmark: New Sounds.
Lloyd-Kelly, M., Gobet, F., & Lane, P.C.R. (2016). Under pressure: How time-limited cognition explains statistical learning by 8-month old infants. Papafragou, A., Grodner, D., Mirman, D., & Trueswell, J.C. (Eds.). Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M. & Gobet, F. (2016). Incorporating defaulting effects into MOSAIC: Building a two-factor model of the Optional Infinitive stage. Paper presented at the the 2nd LuCiD Language and Communicative Development Conference, Manchester, UK.
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Jones, G. & Gobet, F. (2016). Developmentally plausible learning of word categories from distributional statistics. In A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, & J. C. Trueswell, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 674-679). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Jones, G. & Gobet, F. (2016). Simulating developmental changes in noun richness through performance-limited distributional analysis. In A. Papafragou, D. Grodner, D. Mirman, & J. C. Trueswell, (Eds.), Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 602-607). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Jones, G. & Gobet, F. (2015). Defaulting effects contribute to the simulation of cross-linguistic differences in Optional Infinitive errors. In D. C. Noelle, R. Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings & P. P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 746-751). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., Jones, G. & Gobet, F. (2015). Simulating the cross-linguistic pattern of Optional Infinitive errors in children's declaratives and Wh- questions. Cognition, 143, 61-76.