The Department of Languages, Literatures, & Cultures presents
Dr. Tao Gong (The Hong Kong University) and Dr. Lan Shuai (Johns Hopkins University) who will give a talk entitled "Simulating Vowel Chain Shifts" (Tao GONG) and "Language as an 'interface' -- evidence from tone perception and its lateralization" (Lan SHUAI). The talks are on Tuesday, December 3, 2013 in Herter Hall 210 from 4:00-6:00. Abstracts of the talks follow.
Simulating Vowel Chain Shifts.
Vowel chain shift, as a series of related sound changes leading to a rearrangement of the phonetic realizations, is a typical phonetic change in world languages, yet the explanation for it remains controversial; some scholars highlight the roles of self-organizing property of the vowel space, whereas others emphasize the necessity of phonetic contrast maintenance. In this talk, based primarily on Bart de Boer's self-organizing model and the empirical data of vowel chain shifts in Xumi language, I present an agent-based computer simulation to address this controversy and explain how the vowel chain shift in Upper Xumi occurs. The simulation results show that extended vowel chain shift cannot be solely explained by self-organization, the phonemic contrast maintenance mechanism is also necessary. Under these two factors, the vowel chain shift in Upper Xumi can be explained as the combined effect of the evolution of vowel system under noise conditions and the addition of the loan phoneme /ɔ/. This is the first simulation attempt to address the process of an extended vowel shift in relation to real-world data.
Langauge as an Interface — evidence from Tone Perception and its lateralization
In this talk, I report my ERP studies investigating the hemispheric specialization of tone perception. This line of research begins with the debate between the task-dependent (based on linguistic mechanisms) and cue-dependent (based on acoustically driven mechanisms) hypotheses, which predict opposite lateralization patterns. Since lexical tone is defined as the use of pitch variations to distinguish lexical meanings, it is natural to examine both the linguistic function and acoustic property of lexical tone, and my work shows that both aspects affect the lateralization in tone perception, in both early (~200 ms) and late (~400 ms) time windows. This work contributes to a more complete picture of tone lateralization, and supports a parallel processing of both linguistic and acoustic factors. It further indicates that language functions such as tone perception involve various concurrent cognitive functions, linguistic and non-linguistic, such as semantic memory or pitch perception, which is in accordance with the ‘mosaic theory’ stating that “language is regarded as a kind of ‘interface’ among a variety of more basic abilities” (Wang, 1978).
