The number of undergraduates in the department is expected to skyrocket after the success of the Undergraduate Major Night. 24 prospective linguists arrived to the dinner to hear talks from Tom Wasow and John Rickford on the Quotative ALL project, Nola Stephens on First Language Acquisition, and Phil Hubbard on teaching English as a Second Language.
Present and future linguists at Majors Night
Undergrads Edgar Navarro, Aya Inamori, and Josh Falk give testimonials to the power of Linguistics.
The event was organized in part by SLing, the newly-formed undergraduate Linguistics club.
Middy Pineda will inform us about “Phonetic adaptation in non-native speech: Insights from a distributional analysis of long-lag VOT.” from noon to one in room 50 today at Speech Lunch. See you there! Here is the abstract:
Speakers encountering long-lag VOT for the first time in their L2 produce VOTs between their L1 and L2 values. Native-like long-lag productions are conditioned by speaker competency factors such as age of acquisition and experience, showing significant production differences between late bilinguals, early bilinguals, and native L2 speakers. Thus far, analyses have focused on average VOTs across speaker groups. We investigate the full distributional properties of VOT in bilinguals (e.g. variation, skewness) in addition to averages to provide a more informative picture of bilingual acquisition. We collected VOT production data from French-English bilinguals (age of English onset 0-15 years) and conducted a distribution-based analysis. Our results show that while speaker groups differ predictably in mean VOT, our analysis discovers subgroups based on common production behaviors; eliminating the gross categorizations of early and late bilinguals and moving toward gradual and predictable shapes of VOT that are correlated with English schooling, time in an English-speaking country, and age of acquisition. Ultimately, we predict that these results will fill in some missing blanks between perception and production, and suggest, for example, that differences in perceived accent and comprehensibility diverge due to the degree of overlap with native L2 VOTs.
All are welcome to impose themselves on the upcoming Linguistics colloquium, where Don Winford (The Ohio State University) will hold forth on “On the Unity of Contact Phenomena – The Case for Imposition.” That’s 1:15pm in the Greenberg Room. Be there or be square:
The emergent field of Contact Linguistics faces a number of fundamental challenges, not least of which is to reach agreement on a unified theoretical framework for the study of contact-induced change. All of the frameworks that have been proposed recognize two broad types of cross-linguistic influence, which Thomason & Kaufman (1988) originally referred to as “borrowing” versus “interference via shift” or “substratum influence.” But there still remains a surprising lack of consistency or consensus about the classification of contact-induced changes and the processes or mechanisms that create them. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the literature concerned with so-called interference phenomena. They embrace a wide array of outcomes that have been referred to variously as cases of structural convergence, indirect diffusion, grammatical replication, selective copying, convergence intertwining, and so on. I argue here that all of these cases of structural diffusion are the result of a single mechanism of contact-induced change, which, following van Coetsem (1988, 2000), I refer to as imposition. This approach provides a basis for a unified treatment of various kinds of change found in second language acquisition, creole formation, situations of structural convergence, and gradual attrition of a native language under conditions of shift to a new primary language.
Get ready for CUSP, the 2nd California Universities Semantics and Pragmatics conference, this Saturday in scenic UC Santa Cruz. Here’s the website, with location and program information. Quite a few Stanford people will give talks:
- Jessica Spencer
A Game-theoretic Analysis of Copula Emergence in Saramaccan
- Cleo Condoravdi and Sven Lauer
Performing A Wish: Desiderative Assertions and Performativity
- Olena Andrushenko
Evolution of Instrumental Component Realization within an Intended Action in Middle English
And if you don’t want to travel all the way down to Santa Cruz, you can stay here and attend the Conference on Language and Power, also this Saturday in Cordura 100.
Speech Lunch is returning today with a talk from Rui Wang (CCRMA) about “Brainwave confusion and perceptual confusion of phonemes”. Come to Jordan Hall Room 050 at noon to hear more:
Abstract:
The work proposes a framework that can identify the perceptual features which are distinctive for the brainwave representations of the phonemes as well. The importance of the features to distinguish the brainwaves is ranked according to the empirical data. The results are compared to the phoneme perceptual experiments and the invariants of the features in brainwaves and perception are discussed.
Alessandro Jaker will give his dissertation proposal talk today, 1:15 pm, in the Greenberg conference room. His title is Word Prosody and Level Ordering in Weledeh Dogrib. And join us at 4:00 pm for the department social.
On Monday, Yao Yao will be travelling from distant Berkeley to present to the Phonetics and Phonology Workshop on “A corpus-based study on the effect of phonological neighborhood density on speech production.” Be there at 7pm in the Greenberg Room, or show up at 6:45 for dinner!
This study investigates the effect of phonological neighborhood density on speech production in spontaneous speech. Phonological neighborhood density (PND) refers to the number of words that are phonologically similar to a given word. Previous literature has shown that unlike other frequency- or probability-based measures (e.g. lexical frequency, contextual predictability), PND has opposite effects on perception (i.e. inhibitory) and production (i.e. facilitatory). Therefore it is an interesting question whether in actual speech, the speaker will hyperarticulate high-PND words for the sake of the listener or hypoarticulate them as a result of easy production.
The current study uses data from a spontaneous speech corpus. The dataset consists of around 13,000 word tokens, all monomorphemic CVC content words. Separate linear mixed-effect models are built to predict word duration and vowel dispersion based on neighborhood density, average frequency of neighbors, as well as a wide range of control factors from the speaker, the word and the context. The results show that everything else being equal, high-PND words are shorter than low-PND words, and words with high-frequency neighbors are realized with more dispersed vowels than words with less frequent neighbors. In other words, the results with word duration provide evidence for speaker-internal forces in speech production, but the results with vowel dispersion indicate the pressure to distinguish confusing words in the lexicon. Implications of these results for the speech production model are also discussed.
Enjoyed the math section of your GRE? Maria Martiniello, from the ETS Center for Validity Research, will be presenting to the group on Language, Equity, and Educational Policy (LEEP) this Tuesday about “Language and the Performance of English Language Learners on Math Problems.” The talk will be from 12:30-1:30pm, in Barnum 116, with free pizza and refreshments.
Abstract:
Guidelines for the assessment of English language learners (ELLs) on academic content tests recommend conducting statistical analysis and empirical studies to investigate the validity and fairness of assessments for ELLs. This session presents an example of such studies in mathematics. The literature claims that excessive linguistic complexity of math word problems is a source of construct-irrelevant difficulty for ELLs. This presentation will examine the impact of linguistic complexity on the relative difficulty of items for ELLs and non-ELLs with equivalent mathematics proficiency. Through students’ responses to think-aloud protocols, this presentation will illustrate linguistic characteristics of math word problems that pose disproportionate difficulty for Spanish-speaking ELLs.
The Claire and John Radway Research Workshop presents a conference on Language and Power, Saturday, November 21, 1:00-6:30 pm, Cordura Hall, Room 100.
Language is the fundamental medium for human communication. The way we use language can affect the way we are perceived by others and the efficacy of our interactions. Conversely, one group can use the power it wields over another to change and control that group’s language use. This conference will examine both these interactions, the effect of language on power and of power on language, from an interdisciplinary perspective, with participants from Anthropology, Sociology, Linguistics, and Political Science.
Check out the conference website for more details.
