Alyssa Ferree unearthened a few early 1980s Stanford Linguistics newsletters, News From Linguistics:
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Check ‘em out. You too can welcome new arrivals Bresnan, Kiparsky, and Peters, celebrate the birth of CSLI, and thank Tom for becoming Department Chair.
Yuan Zhao filed her dissertation on Tuesday, and will be leaving soon to take up a postdoc at the University of Indiana. Sesquongratulations!
Beth Levin sent us this link to useful resources for grad students and their mentors. In addition, we recommend this Crooked Timber post collecting lots of resources on surviving grad school.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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.
From Alyssa:
The Linguistics Major Dinner takes place Tuesday, November 17, 6:00 pm, Building 50, Room 51A. The dinner is an opportunity for undeclared students to learn more about the major and minor, meet faculty and students, learn about research and job opportunities, and connect with other students who are interested in linguistics.
If you have freshmen/sophomore advisees or students, or you know other students interested in linguistics, please encourage them to attend the dinner.
Because dinner will be provided, all attendees need to RSVP at this link.
The University of Chicago Writing Program’s Academic Sentence Generator.
(It’s really no match for ChomskyBot.)