Lap-Ching Keung is giving a talk this week in our Brown Bag (Wednesday, Tobin 521B, 12-1:15). The title of his talk is "Effects of Discourse Status and Planning Difficulty on Acoustic Variation".
His abstract is:
Repeated words within a discourse tend to be acoustically reduced. This variation can be explained by a pragmatic selection rule (discourse status) or by speaker facilitation (planning difficulty). For this experiment, we ask whether these effects are part of the same cognitive system or different systems. Participants saw an array of four objects and described a sequence of two movements like, "The chiddle moved above the hamel. The *cammer moved above the neeken." The *target?s discourse status and planning difficulty were manipulated. Durations were longer for new vs. given and novel vs. familiar, which replicated findings from previous research. More importantly, at the target noun, there was a trend towards an interaction. Givenness had a greater effect on novel targets. Although not significant, onset latency patterned in the same way as target duration, showing a correlation between the two factors. These results together suggest that discourse status is partially mediated by planning difficulty, which further suggests that the two effects are operating from the same cognitive system.
07 October 2013
Lap-Ching Keung on Wednesday
Valentina Brunetto at LARC on Wednesday
Magda Oiry writes:
Valentina Brunetto a post-doc fellow from England and Italy will present
"Acquisition of near-reflexivity"
at the LARC meeting on Wednesday, October 9 at 12:15 in the Partee Room.
Everyone welcome!
Workshop on Quantification a roaring success
Barbara Pearson writes:
We want to report the success of the LARC Workshop on the Acquisition of Quantification, which took place October 4 and 5 in the Math Lounge 1634 at UMass Amherst and was attended by roughly 70 students and more senior experts from Canada, the UK, Hungary, The Netherlands, France, Italy, and Germany, plus New England, New York, New Jersey, and Michigan. Tom Roeper set the tone with his opening comments: "Why are there no methods, only theories: Experimental style and the historical path from syntax to discourse in the acquisition of quantification." Invited talks by Julien Musolino (Rutgers), Bill Philip (Utrecht), and Martin Hackl (MIT) stimulated lots of discussion that spilled over into the breaks and shared meals. Congratulations to organizers Jeremy Hartman and Magda Oiry, with help from Mike Clauss, Tom Roeper, Tom Maxfield and Barbara Pearson.
World Phonotactics Database
From the Department of Linguistics at Australian National University:
We wish to announce the public release of the World Phonotactics
Database, an online searchable relational database containing
information about phonotactic restrictions from around the world.
Using the database, you can compare and contrast phonotactic patterns
in different languages, group languages by features, investigate the
frequencies of different settings for different features, view the
areal distribution of such patterns through the use of the interactive
map, and check correlations with other phonological features.
The World Phonotactics Database includes phonotactic information on
over 2300 languages, with segmental data for an additional 1400. At
their most basic level, each language entry includes information on
phonemic inventories, restrictions on consonant and vowel placement,
and phonotactic restrictions concerning specific sounds in coda and
onset position. The database, which was implemented by James
McElvenny, contains extensive coverage, and is continuously updated as
more data becomes available.
As in any project of this size, the database will contain errors,
whether these be errors in the coding of information or errors in the
sources consulted. We welcome any feedback correcting these errors as
well as any other suggestions or comments you may have. We can be
contacted at phonotactics@anu.edu.au.
For more information and access to the database itself, please visit
http://phonotactics.anu.edu.au
30 September 2013
Workshop on the Acquisition of Quantification
The Linguistics Department will be hosting a workshop on the acquisition of quantification on Friday and Saturday in the Math lounge (Graduate center). Alumni Angeliek Van Hout, Bart Hollebrandse and Gennaro Chierchia have papers, as do locals Tom Roeper, Jill and Peter de Villiers, Amanda Rizun, Jeremy Hartman, Seth Cable, Rama Novogrodsky, and Magda Oiry. There are invited talks by Julien Musolino and Martin Hackl.
Schedule and information can be found at http://blogs.umass.edu/moiry/workshop-quantification/
29 September 2013
Assistant Professor Position at Hampshire College
Joanna Morris from Hampshire College writes:
Hampshire College, an independent, innovative liberal arts institution, is accepting applications for an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the School of Cognitive Science. The position carries a 4-course per year teaching load and also includes supervision of undergraduate concentrations and thesis projects. The area of specialization is open. We are particularly interested in candidates who have successful records in undergraduate teaching and who can make connections across the cognitive or neural sciences.
Hampshire College, located in Amherst, MA, is a member of the Five Colleges, Incorporated, a nonprofit educational consortium established in 1965 to promote the broad educational and cultural objectives of its member institutions which, along with Hampshire, include Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
The consortium fosters close academic collaboration, and facilitates intellectual communities and broad curricular and co-curricular offerings. All members of the consortium benefit from the shared use of educational and cultural resources and facilities, including a joint automated library system. Students are allowed to register for nearly any course offered on any of the five campuses.
Hampshire's unique academic program requires that students work closely with a faculty committee to design and carry out a personalized course of study, the concentration. A concentration may range from a plan of study similar to that of a traditional college major to a highly individualized program of study that encompasses several disciplines or areas of conceptual thought and understanding. There are no courses that are required of all students, and faculty are encouraged to develop innovative interdisciplinary courses that introduce students to their intellectual passions and that explore new, cutting edge areas of scholarship.
The review of applications will begin November 1, 2013 and continue until the position is filled. A Ph.D. is required at time of appointment, July 1, 2014. Hampshire College offers a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits. Applicants should submit the following: 1) letter of application; 2) curriculum vita; 3) teaching statement with descriptions of potential courses; 4) research statement and 5) three professional references via our website at http://jobs.hampshire.edu/
Hampshire College is an equal opportunity institution, committed to building a culturally diverse intellectual community and strongly encourages applications from women and minority candidates.
PRG on Thursday
Claire Moore-Cantwell writes:
PRG will meet on October 3, 7:30pm, chez Ivy. We will be
discussing Robert's paper which he is planning to submit to Phonology.
Further details to follow.
A Language Acquisition position at Boston University
Boston University is currently searching for an Assistant Professor specializing in language acquisition and linguistic theory, and will be conducting interviews at the BUCLD and LSA meetings for applicants in attendance. The application deadline is OCTOBER 1.
For more information: https://academicjobsonline.org/ajo/jobs/2803
Kai von Fintel on howtobecomeaprofessor.com
UMass Alumnus and MIT's Associate Dean of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Kai von Fintel is interviewed about how to be come a linguist. Check it out here.
Call for papers: SALT
Invited Speakers:
Emmanuel Chemla (ENS)
Valentine Hacquard (Maryland)
Lauri Karttunen (Stanford)
Sarah Moss (Michigan)
The conference will be preceded by a series of tutorials on Formal Semantics Beyond Spoken Language, on May 29.
The abstract submission deadline is Monday, December 2, 2013, 11:59 pm EST. We expect to make notifications of acceptance in late February.Detailed instructions are available at: http://www.nyu.edu/salt2014
Please direct inquiries to salt2014inquiry@gmail.com or reply to this message.
BUCLD Registration open
38th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development
November 1-3, 2013
Elena Lieven, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology / University of Manchester
Plenary Speaker:
CANCELED: Heather van der Lely, Harvard University
Unfortunately, Heather van der Lely's plenary address has been cancelled for health reasons. We regret that we cannot hear her address and wish her the best in recovery.
Symposia:
Saturday - 'Resolving A Learnability Paradox in the Acquisition of Verb Argument Structure: What have we learned in the last 25 years'
Ben Ambridge (University of Liverpool) (organizer)
Adele Goldberg (Princeton University)
Joshua Hartshorne (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) & Jesse Snedeker (Harvard University)
Steven Pinker (Harvard University)
Sunday - 'A new approach to language learning: filtering through the processor'
Helen Goodluck (University of York) (organizer)
Lyn Frazier (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)
Colin Phillips (University of Maryland, College Park)
We would like to remind you that the deadline to pre-register for BUCLD 38 is Tuesday, October 23, 2013. By pre-registering not only will you receive a reduced rate for the conference, but you will also be able to check-in at the registration desk quickly and proceed to the various exciting talks without waiting in line. Regular full-price registration will continue to be available online from Thursday, October 24 through Tuesday, October 29. To register, please visit the following website:
http://www.bu.edu/bucld/conference-info/registration/
For general information on the conference including the full schedule, please visit:
http://www.bu.edu/bucld
Also, you can register for the Society for Language Development Symposium "Mechanisms of Word Learning" on Thursday October 31, 1-6pm through our website. The SLD would also like to announce their student award. Please see their website for more information:
http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/sld/symposium.html
Johnson in Leipzig
Kyle Johnson is giving a talk entitled "The Empty Category Principle and linearization" at the 28th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop Saturday, October 5 at the University of Leipzig. The Workshop's website is here.
25 September 2013
Akira Omaki speaks at department colloq
Akira Omaki of Johns Hopkins will be giving a colloquium:
Friday, Sept. 27, 3:30 pm
in Machmer E-37.
Title and abstract are below.
Learning to parse syntactic dependencies
Much psycholinguistic research has investigated the relation between distributional information and expectations in language comprehension. One way to study this relation is to examine how expectations arise during sentence processing in adults as a function of relevant distributional information in corpora. An alternate approach is to explore how such predictive behaviors grow in children as a result of relevant distributional information that accumulates over a longer period of time. This presentation will discuss a series of studies that explore the second approach, with a focus on learning and processing of non-local dependencies. The first part of the talk explores the role of transitional probability information (and its breakdown) in learning a dependency between 'is' and 'ing' (e.g., John is kick-ing the ball). It is shown that 15 month old infants, who generally do not demonstrate sensitivity to the co-occurrence of is and ing, can use statistical (ir)regularities and learn to detect the co-occurrence relationship after a few minutes of exposure to input in the lab. The fact that children rely on distributional information to discover non-local dependencies makes it feasible that the acquired representations with statistical information may guide parsing of such non-local dependencies. The second part of the talk presents developmental research on comprehension of various wh-questions. It is shown that children's syntactic expectations in filler-gap dependency processing may be slightly different from the type of expectations that have been observed in adults, despite the fact that the distributional information available for children should fully support adult-like expectations. I will discuss implications of such findings for psycholinguistic models of syntactic predictions, as well as relevant linguistic and cognitive factors that may need to grow before adult-like predictive behaviors emerge.
22 September 2013
Clauss at LARC/Language Acquisition Lab on Wednesday
Magda Oiry writes:
Michael Clauss will present
"Exploring the distinction between Wh clauses and Question clauses in Child English"
at the LARC meeting on Wednesday, September 25 at 12:15 in the Partee Room.
Everyone welcome!
Andrew Weir in Leiden
Andrew Weir gave a paper, "Fragment Answers and congruence with Question under Discussion" at the Identity in Ellipsis Conference at Leiden University yesterday, September 21. For more information about the conference, click here.
Call for papers: GLOW 37
The annual meeting of the Generative Linguists of the Old World will take place in Brussels April 2-11, 2014. In addition to the main colloquium, there will be a workshop on "Phonological Specification and Interface Interpretation" and another workshop on "Understanding Possession." Paula Fikkert, John Harris and Bert Vaux are invited speakers to the first workshop, and Chris Barker and Kilu von Prince are invited speakers to the second workshop. Two page abstracts should be submitted by December 1, 2013. More information can be found here.
Lisa Green in Ithaca
Lisa Green will give a talk at Cornell entitled "Inversion in African American English: When Negation Isn't Enough" on September 26 (Thursday).
Call for Papers: Representing the Speech of Others
(Re)presenting the Speech of Others
Date: 13-Mar-2014 - 14-Mar-2014
Call Deadline: 01-Dec-2013
Location: Groningen, Netherlands
Organization: Franziska Köder & Emar Maier
Hosted by the ERC project BLENDS
Contact: f.koder@rug.nl
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https://sites.google.com/site/representing2014/
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There are different ways of reporting what someone else has said. Common forms of speech reports are direct speech (Mary said 'I am sick') and indirect speech (Mary said that she is sick). Pretense and role play are closely related phenomena. Like in direct speech, someone engaging in role play adopts the perspective of another person and produces utterances from that shifted standpoint (I am sick) (Harris, 2000). Another interesting parallel is that children start to use speech reports and to engage in role play at around the same time, namely at two to three years of age. This is well before they pass standard false belief tests (at around four) which are often taken to be the hallmark of Theory of Mind and metarepresentation (e.g. Perner, 1991).
Since at least some forms of reported speech exhibit recursion, intensionality, and/or clausal embedding, this developmental gap may shed new light on the debate over the relationship between Theory of Mind and the syntax/semantics of recursive embedding (e.g. de Villiers & de Villiers, 2000). The aim of the conference is to discuss the cognitive and conceptual relationship of reported speech, pretense and cognitive abilities such as perspective-taking, metarepresentation and Theory of Mind.
Keynote Speakers:
- Paul L. Harris
- Josef Perner
- Jill de Villiers
Call for Papers:
We invite authors to submit an anonymous two-page abstract by 1 December 2013
, for a talk of 20 minutes plus 10 minutes discussion or a poster. Submissions should be made via Easychair. We welcome theoretically and empirically oriented contributions addressing some of the following topics of interest from the perspectives of (psycho)linguistics, philosophy, psychology or semantics.
Topics of Interest:
- Development of reported speech
- Development of pretense/ role play
- Direct and indirect speech
- Perspective shift, role shift, deictic/indexical shift
- Theory of Mind / mindreading
- Metacognition and metarepresentation
Barbara in London and Cambridge
Barbara is in England Sept 24-29 for a big conference and a little workshop. On September 25, she and Luigi Rizzi will be the two speakers at a small workshop organized by Ian Roberts at the University of Cambridge on “Formal Approaches to Linguistic Theory”, where her talk will be “The starring role of quantifiers in the history of formal semantics”. Then on Sept 26-27, she’ll be one of the speakers in a big conference in London sponsored by the British Academy, organized by Ian Roberts and Theresa Biberauer, on the theme “The Cognitive Revolution 60 Years On” . Her talk there will be “How syntax and semantics have provoked different views of linguistic competence.”
Call for abstracts: CHRONOS 11
The deadline for abstracts for Chronos 11 (11th International Conference on Actionality, Tense, Aspect, Modality/Evidentiality), which will take place in Pisa on 16--18 June 2014, is 31 October 2013. For more information go here.
In addition to the main session, of particular note is the variety of interesting workshops proposed.