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.

In recent years, this issue has been examined by a wealth of neuroimaging studies, with the goal of identifying lexical and sub-lexical processing pathways at the neural level. This work contributes to that growing body of literature by presenting data from a word-pseudoword listening task using electrocorticography (ECoG), a technique which records neural activity directly from the cerebral cortex. ECoG data is relatively new to the neurolinguistics literature, but has a high spatial and temporal resolution, an advantage in tracing processing pathways. Results are discussed in light of Hickok and Poeppel’s (2007) dual-stream model of language processing. The data suggests that at early processing stages, words and pseudowords share a pathway in regions of the brain identified as being involved with phonetic, phonological, and lexical processing.

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.

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.

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. Most members of this community were born deaf and due to a genetic condition have been losing their vision slowly over the course of many years. In 2007, collective efforts shifted from developing compensatory strategies for accessing visual fields of engagement to bringing a tactile field of engagement into being. Drawing on more than 40 hours of videotaped interaction, one year of sustained ethnographic fieldwork, and more than 14 years of involvement in this community, I sketch the process through which relations of embedding in a visual world grew thin and broke apart, how the rubble was recuperated and reconfigured, and how a new tactile language and new forms of tactile subjectivity began to cohere. Condensation is put forth as a key concept for an anthropological approach to language emergence.