Today at 12:15 in the Greenberg Room, Emily Cibelli (Berkeley) will be presenting on some of her neurolinguistic work for the Phonetics and Phonology Workshop.
Early processing pathways of words and pseudowords: Evidence from electrocorticography
Pseudowords – phonotactically-legal novel forms like “blick” and “piteretion” – are common tools employed in studies of lexical processing. They are often compared to words, under the assumption that these novel forms isolate sub-lexical levels of processing; however, there is some debate about whether words and pseudowords utilize shared or distinct pathways at early stages of processing. Critically, the answer to this question affects the interpretation what is being isolated in word-pseudoword comparisons.
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Come to the Greenberg Room (460-126) this afternoon for Jim McCloskey‘s (UCSC) colloquium on syntax and Irish. The talk will start at 3:30, and there will be a social after!
Examining the syntax of nonfinite clauses in modern varieties of Irish reveals a pattern of variation which is intricate, rapidly shifting, and revealing about how the fundamental grammatical relations should be understood. This paper tries to better understand those patterns and to learn from them about how variation could or should be understood in theoretical terms.
Come to the Greenberg Room on Monday 5/20 from 12:15-1:05. Ellen Markman (Psychology) will be presenting for the SymSys Forum, a talk entitled “How children generalize what they have learned: Factors that affect the scope, importance, and robustness of generalization”.
A fundamental component of learning is how to extend what was learned to new exemplars, situations, and contexts. Recent advances in the field have revealed that accumulating statistical evidence over time is only one of the factors that effects generalization. Moreover generalization is itself multifaceted: Is the new information deemed applicable to a narrow or broad range of exemplars or situations? Is the information acquired construed as central, definitive, essential or as less important? Is the generalization robust, made with confidence, or tentative and easily revised? To sort all of this out, children rely on a variety of sources of information including: (a) prior knowledge (b) linguistically conveyed information such as generic versus non-generic language (c) other communicative and social means of conveying information such as pragmatics, intentional versus accidental actions, the pedagogical stance, and trust in testimony. I will review recent research that highlights how children navigate these complicated issues.
Terra Edwards (Berkeley) will be presenting for the Anthropology brown bag forum on Monday 5/20 from 12-1:05 in 50-51A. The title and abstract are below. Come on by!
Language Emergence as Condensation in the Seattle Deaf-Blind Community
This paper examines the socio-genesis of a tactile language currently emerging among Deaf-Blind people in Seattle, Washington. Language emergence has been understood in recent work on signed languages as a moment when form-meaning correspondences abstract away from the contexts of their use. Language emergence in the Seattle Deaf-Blind community suggests instead that via “condensation”, the linguistic system grows dense with its history of use. Read the rest of this entry »