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.
London will be swarming with Stanford linguists and Stanford Linguistics alums this weekend, mostly due to the conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory. Among those presenting are:
- Tyler Schnoebelen
Classifying Shabo
- Tatiana Nikitina (Freie Universität, Berlin)
Displaced arguments: S-O-V-X word order in Mande
- Rachel Nordlinger, University of Melbourne
Murrinh-Patha agreement: implications for the relationship between theory and description
Some Stanford linguists will be enjoying a very different climate in Honolulu this weekend, at the 19th Japanese/Korean Linguistics Conference at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Here they are:
- Chigusa Kurumada and Shoichi Iwasaki (UCLA)
Negotiating desirability: The acquisition of the uses of ii ‘good’ in mother-child interactions in Japanese
- Kyuwon Moon
Consonant cluster simplification in Seoul Korean: A morphologically driven account of variation
And Austin will be welcoming a number of Stanford people for the Texas Linguistics Society’s 12th Annual Conference. Cleo Condoravdi, Lauri Karttunen, and Annie Zaenen will be giving invited talks in the Workshop on Discourse Structure, and other talks include:
- Elizabeth Coppock, Stephen Wechsler
Clitic vs. Agreement in Hungarian
- Patricia Amaral
”Both are Close”: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches to Word Meaning
This afternoon we will hear a stirring presentation on “Coherent contexts: Dynamic reasoning with aspectual information” from Alice ter Meulen (U Geneva) in the Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop at 1:15pm in the Greenberg room. Curiously, there is also a Colloquium on precisely the same topic with the same speaker in the same room at the same time. Don’t miss either of these! The abstract for the Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop and the Colloquium is below:
The dynamic semantics of aspectual adverbs first contrasts English, German and Dutch data, using respectively prosody, word order and composition to add subjective information to factual description. It is subsequently applied to dialogue, conditionals and interrogative contexts. The observed linguistic variety in aspectual quantification is analyzed in terms of focus and information structure. The temporal meaning of aspectual adverbs blends into meta-linguistic uses where generic background constraints may support the current context to create coherence, considering apparent counterexamples to be exceptions. This DRT semantics is claimed to provide adequate representational tools to account for the observed inferences, obviating tailor-made default inference or externally characterized ‘normal’ worlds.
Those of you who have stayed tuned at the will have noted that Matthew Adams will be talking there on Monday (7pm, in the Greenberg Room). He will present his recent work on Welsh meter, to wit: “An Optimality-Theoretic account of the cynghanedd lusg and cynghanedd groes.” Pob lwc! See you there!
The Claire and John Radway Research Workshop on Cognition and Language, a function of the Stanford Humanities Center, will be presenting a conference this upcoming 21 November on Language and Power (unfortunately concurrent with CUSP!). Presentations include:
Kwai Ng (UCSD, Sociology): Legal Formalism as Linguistic Power: Observations from the Bilingual Common Law Courtrooms in Hong Kong
Miyako Inoue (Stanford, Anthropology)
Lev Michael (Berkeley, Linguistics): Power relations in language shift and revitalization: The case of Iquito
David Laitin (Stanford, Political Science): Linguistic Nationalism as a Consumption Item
H. Samy Alim (UCLA, Anthropology)
Check out the Language and Power Conference website for a schedule and abstracts.
Our visitor Petra Hendriks will be talking about “On the relation between grammar, acquisition and processing: A case study in pronoun interpretation” today at 1:15pm in the Greenberg Room. Here are some details:
The Delay of Principle B Effect (DPBE) in language acquisition is a well-known effect that has motivated widely distinct views on the relation between grammar and other linguistic resources necessary for sentence interpretation. In this talk I discuss a computational model that colleagues in Groningen and I recently developed within the cognitive architecture ACT-R (Van Rij et al., 2009; in press). This cognitive model is based on an optimality theoretic account that attributes the DPBE to children’s inability as hearers to also take into account the speaker’s perspective (Hendriks & Spenader, 2005/6). The cognitive model predicts that child hearers are unable to take into account the speaker’s perspective because their speed of linguistic processing is too limited to perform this second step in interpretation. We tested this hypothesis empirically in a psycholinguistic study, in which we slowed down the speech rate to give children more time for interpretation, and in a computational simulation study. The results of the two studies confirm the predictions of our model. Moreover, these studies show that embedding a theory of linguistic competence in a cognitive architecture allows for the generation of detailed and testable predictions with respect to linguistic performance.