The notion of a domain of locality as specified by structured objects (trees or acyclic graphs, instead of strings, for example) has been explored in the context of some linguistic, computational, statistical and psycholinguistic properties. Such studies provide insights into many aspects of strong generative capacity, i.e., the set of structural descriptions characterized by a formal system. In this talk, I will discuss some of the recent applications of these ideas to the description of some aspects of the secondary and higher structures (folded structures) of biological sequences such as RNAs and proteins.

What is the relevance of this topic to cognitive science? The formal machinery used here for modeling some aspects of the folded structures of biological sequences was developed in the context of language structure, so the relevance in one direction is clear. What about the relevance in the other direction? If you come to the talk we can speculate about this towards the end of the talk or better still over a glass of wine!