prosodylab

cab drivers and non-native phonological contrasts

It’s hard not to think of the acquisition of non-native phonological contrasts when reading about the research on London cab-drivers described here (well, if you’re a linguist, that is). I found the blog post via a discussion of the study here.

Essentially, London cab-drivers are better at learning new routes than a control group when the new route is located in an unfamiliar city, but they have a harder time learning a new route than a control group when it is located in London, and thus competes with their previous knowledege. This latter effect seems similar to the observation that it’s harder to learn a new phonological contrast after having already learned a language, compared to when acquiring a first language.

Various people have indeed argued that our ability to learn new types of phonological contrasts might deteriorate not (just) because we are past a critical period of brain development, but (also) because after having learned our first language(s), it’s become harder to fit new contrasts into our existing ‘map.’ By having learned a language we might have developed “an inability to inhibit access to existing (and now competing) memory representations,” to quote from the blog post on cab drivers. This idea is advocated here:

Kuhl, P. K. (2000). Language, mind, and brain: Experience alters perception. In M. S. Gazzaniga (Ed.), The new cognitive neurosciences (2nd ed.) (pp. 99-115). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Perhaps one could test whether there is really a parallel between the results found for cab-drivers and language learners by comparing how well we can learn a particular new contrast when it’s presented as part of a very different language as opposed to as part of a different dialect of our native language. The latter should actually be more difficult, if the parallel would hold up, although one would somehow have to control for the familiarity with the lexical material. And I guess there should be less of an issue in learning a new gestural contrast in a sign language if you’ve only learned a spoken languages before, compared to having previous knowledge in a sign language. Maybe someone has already tested this?

phonology in the 21 century: in honor of glyne piggott

When: May 7-9 2011
Where: McGill University

‘Phonology in the 21st Century: In Honour of Glyne Piggott’ is a conference to honour Glyne Piggott, who retired in May 2010 from McGill University. For over forty years, Prof. Piggott has been a supporter of the highest quality research in phonology. He is well recognized for maintaining the most rigorous approach to theory building and testing, coupled with intellectual breadth and curiosity. He instills in those around him the need to have a wide perspective on thinking in the field, and challenges his students to become independent scholars who will survive the theoretical whims of the time. Although the conference is organized to honour Prof. Piggott, its theoretical objective is to highlight phonological research at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, evaluating the contributions of the past forty years in light of the primary theoretical and empirical concerns of today.

Call for Papers

experimental and theoretical advances in prosody

The special issue of Language and Cognitive Processes with contribution from the 2008 conference Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody has appeared online:

Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of an utterance. Prosody is critical for parsing speech, constructing syntactic structure, and building a representation of the conversational discourse model, among other linguistic functions.

In 2008, researchers from linguistics, psychology and computer science gathered at the inaugural meeting of the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody at Cornell University. The papers in this volume represent the cutting edge of the prosody work presented at that conference.

two new articles online

Michael Wagner and Katherine McCurdy. 2010. Poetic rhyme reflects cross-linguistic differences in information structure. Cognition 117. 166–175. [doi] [preprint]

Identical rhymes (right/write, attire/retire) are considered satisfactory and even artistic in French poetry but are considered unsatisfactory in English. This has been a consistent generalization over the course of centuries, a surprising fact given that other aspects of poetic form in French were happily applied in English. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that this difference is not merely one of poetic tradition, but is grounded in the distinct ways in which information-structure affects prosody in the two languages. A study of rhyme usage in poetry and a perception experiment confirm that native speakers’ intuitions about rhyming in the two languages indeed differ, and a further perception experiment supports the hypothesis that this fact is due to a constraint on prosody that is active in English but not in French. The findings suggest that certain forms of artistic expression in poetry are influenced, and even constrained, by more general properties of a language.

Mara Breen, Evelina Fedorenko, Michael Wagner and Edward Gibson: Acoustic correlates of information structure. 2010. _Language and Cognitive Processes_25.7. 1044–1098. [doi] [preprint]

This paper reports three studies aimed at addressing three questions about the acoustic correlates of information structure in English: (1) do speakers mark information structure prosodically, and, to the extent they do; (2) what are the acoustic features associated with different aspects of information structure; and (3) how well can listeners retrieve this information from the signal? The information structure of subjectverbobject sentences was manipulated via the questions preceding those sentences: elements in the target sentences were either focused (i.e., the answer to a wh-question) or given (i.e., mentioned in prior discourse); furthermore, focused elements had either an implicit or an explicit contrast set in the discourse; finally, either only the object was focused (narrow object focus) or the entire event was focused (wide focus). The results across all three experiments demonstrated that people reliably mark (1) focus location (subject, verb, or object) using greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0, and (2) focus breadth, such that narrow object focus is marked with greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0 on the object than wide focus. Furthermore, when participants are made aware of prosodic ambiguity present across different information structures, they reliably mark focus type, so that contrastively focused elements are produced with greater intensity, longer duration, and lower mean and maximum F0 than noncontrastively focused elements. In addition to having important theoretical consequences for accounts of semantics and prosody, these experiments demonstrate that linear residualisation successfully removes individual differences in people’s productions thereby revealing cross-speaker generalisations. Furthermore, discriminant modelling allows us to objectively determine the acoustic features that underlie meaning differences.

not even a dog barked

When a friend recommended Cormac Mccarthy's 'All the pretty horses' (the first part of the border-trilogy) to me 12 years ago, I first wondered why I would ever want to read a book that promised to mostly involve cowboys and horses and a lot of clichés about the west. A short ways into the book I realized how wrong I was---not about what the books is about, it indeed does involve mostly cowboys and horses and contains lots of familiar clichés---but I was wrong to think that such superficialities might in any way affect the degree of how captivated I would be with this book. In the hands of this writer any cliché is immediately restored to something untainted and original. I don't know how he does it, but I've since read many of his books and I'm still on the hook, and also still at a loss to explain why. Or maybe I do know why. He's just a fantastic writer and story-teller. Who cares what about, and whether sunsets are ridden into or not? I'm not surprised McCarthy is rumored to be among he favorites for this year's Nobel prize which will be announced in a few hours.

But coming back to the clichés (this post will touch on prosody eventually...). One very noticeable trope that keeps coming up in All the pretty horses are animal emitted and other scene-setting sounds. There's coyotes yammering and yapping, horse whinnying, desert doves waking, and, yes, dogs are barking. Pointing out that barking dogs are a cliché is already a cliché itself, but this article , which I came across googleing around while writing this blog post, does a particularly good job at that, and also at providing ample evidence that dogs bark everywhere around us the moment we pick up a book. And they form such a natural and effective part of the narrative in All the pretty horses that one has to conclude that tropes cannot be branded as clichés by themselves and black-listed because of how they have come to be used previously--- how stale or original they seem all depends on how they are used in a particular case. Maybe [prescriptive rules on how to avoid clichés](http://www.ehow.com/how_5423914_avoid-clichs-writing.html) are at the level of content what prescriptive rules about grammar at the level of style: silly. And maybe using clichés is like splitting infinitives: At times awkward, but often appropriate and [sometimes necessary](http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000901.html). So what are scene-setting sounds? I mean sounds that are not really part of the plot, but are used to set the stage, they are part of the background. The border between sounds that are part of the plot and those that are just background is blurry of course, and it's often artificial to single out sounds from other scene-setting elements and descriptions of nature, but let's go with the prototype of the notorious barking dog and see what we find. The first occurrence in _All the Pretty Horses_ is on page three: _In the distance, a calf bawled._

prosody.lab at the lsa

The 2011 LSA Institute, at University of Colorado, Boulder, will take place July 7-August 2. The courses have now been posted. If you’re interested in prosody, you might want to check out this one:

Prosody in the Lab

Instructor(s): Michael Wagner

Description:

You will learn how to test hypotheses about speech prosody in the lab. The focus is on learning by doing: You will design and carry out your own experiments (alone or in groups), and will learn some basics about how to evaluate them. The class projects will revolve around prosody. Prosody forms part of phonology, but often encodes syntax (e.g., via prosodic phrasing) or semantics/pragmatics (e.g., focus and topic structure, pragmatics of intonational tunes). There will be a broad range of projects from different domains you can choose from–or advanced students may want to come up with one of their own. So rather than covering the topic in breadth, this class encourages you to look at a very tightly circumscribed question that can be experimentally answered, and learn about prosody in general by studying something very particular. The class will make use of an experimental software developed in our lab that makes it easy to collect production data and automatically annotate them, and can also run simple perception experiments.

Prerequisites:
The course will require some general computer savviness, but mostly it will require a lot of enthusiasm and ability to work with some independence (jointly with others) on a class project. Some background in quantitative methods would help but is not required.

Lila Gleitman and Norvin Richards at McGill

Two great talks coming up:

The CRLMB Distinguished Lecture Series presents:
Lila Gleitman: If the shoe fits: Earliest steps in vocabulary acquisition

Time: Thursday, Sep. 16, 2010 - 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Location: Leacock Building, Room 232, 855 Sherbrooke Street West

As a precondition for entering the human community, infants must efficiently and rapidly acquire the meanings of words Their first procedures for doing so rely heavily on noticing the contingencies between the occurrence of a sound (e.g. “shoe”) with something observed (say, a shoe) in the environment. Because these links between sound and interpretive cue are notoriously uncertain and sometimes misleading, the procedure has widely been conceived as an associative-statistical one in which the choice of meaning is determined across several examples by recovering the features that recur most systematically with the sound (cf., Hume, 1740). Recent experimental results appear to support this position (Yu & Smith, 2007, inter alia). But several commentators and experimenters have pointed to the sheer rate and relative errorlessness of word learning as favoring a more insightful, one-trial, learning procedure that has been called “fast mapping” (Carey, 1978). In this talk I will present new experiments in word learning that strongly support the latter view. Discussion turns on the reasons why – experiments aside – this must be true. Prominent among such reasons is the “poverty of the stimulus” problem that also motivates theorizing about language acquisition at levels below (phonetics) and above (syntactic) the word form.

The Colloquium Talk Series at the Linguistics Department presents:
Norvin Richards (MIT): Affix Support and the EPP

Time: Friday, Sep. 17, 3:30 PM to 5:00 PM
Location: Education Building, Room 216, 3700 McTavish Street

The distribution of EPP effects in the world’s languages is famously uneven; we find them in languages like English and French, but they seem to be absent in languages like Spanish and Italian. The point of this talk will be to develop a theory to predict the distribution of EPP effects from independently observable properties of languages, having to do with verbal morphology and the placement of stress in the verb. The proposal is part of a research program that seeks to provide deeper explanations for syntactic phenomena by allowing the syntax to make more extensive reference to phonology than we are used to. Part of the goal of the talk will be to explore the consequences the proposal has for our understanding of the interface between syntax and phonology.

workshop on focus and topic at glow 34 in vienna

Next year’s glow in vienna will include a workshop on the phonological marking of focus and topic, organized by Edwin Williams. Note that this workshop has a separate submission site on easy chair.

Call Deadline: 01-Nov-2010

Meeting Description:

GLOW 34 will be hosted by the department of linguistics, University of
Vienna
Colloquium: April 28-30, 2011,
Workshops: April 27 2011, May 1, 2011
Colloquium Topic: How much syntax is there in grammar?
Subject areas: Phonology, Semantics, Morphology, Syntax, Pragmatics,
Psycholinguistics

In addition there will be three workshops:

Intervention Effects from a Semantic Perspective
April 27, 2011

Workshop on the Phonological Marking of Focus and Topic
April 27, 2011

Identity in Grammar
May 1, 2011

call for papers for general session

Here’s the description of the workshop on focus and topic:

The workshop will take the semantic notions of topic and focus as given, and investigate the systems for phonologically marking them, especially concentrating on variation in how the marking is done across languages. For example, we have the shiftable pitch-accents of Germanic languages vs. the relatively fixed prosodic structures of Romance; on a broader scale, we have languages like Japanese that do not use pitch-accents to mark focus, but nevertheless mark focus phonologically, through phrasing and varying pitch range. The following empirical and analytic questions are put forward as central to the project of the workshop:

* Are there languages in which there is no prosodic reflex of contrastive focus or givenness?
* How do those languages which encode focus and givenness prosodically differ in the phonological and phonetic tools to mark these notions?
* Do phrasing and prominence go hand-in-hand, or are they two orthogonal dimensions that interact with focus and givenness marking independently?
* Which comes first, focus or prominence; that is, is the mapping accent-to-focus or focus-to-accent?
* Are differences in focus marking paralleled by differences in topic marking?
* How does the marking of contrastive or’‘corrective’’ focus/topic differ from neutral focus/topic across languages?
* How do phonological means of marking topic or focus interact with syntactic and morphological means?

Comparative studies are especially encouraged, as well as studies of systems different from the well-known ones.

very-large-scale phonetics research

UPenn is hosting a workshop on New tools and methods for very-large-scale phonetics research, on January 28-30, 2011. Here’s the call for papers:

The field of phonetics has experienced two revolutions in the last century: the advent of the sound spectrograph in the 1950s and the application of computers beginning in the 1970s. Today, advances in digital multimedia, networking and mass storage are promising a third revolution: a movement from the study of small, mostly artificial datasets to the analysis of published corpora of natural speech that are thousands of times larger.

To welcome and promote this revolution, we will organize a workshop on new tools and methods for Very-Large-Scale phonetics research, as part of a newly awarded NSF grant. The themes of the workshop include: integration of speech technology in phonetics studies; variation and invariance in large speech corpora; and revisiting classic phonetic and phonological problems from the perspective of corpus phonetics. A tutorial on forced alignment and the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner will also be provided prior to the workshop.

Selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Linguistics.
Important Dates

* Nov. 8, 2010: Abstract submission deadline
* Jan. 28, 2011: Tutorial on forced alignment
* Jan. 29-30, 2011: Workshop

issp in montreal

The next International Seminar on Speech Production will take place next summer in Montreal. Here’s the call for papers:

We are pleased to announce that the the ninth International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP’11) will be held in Montreal, Canada from June 20th to 23rd, 2011. ISSP’11 is the continuation of a series of seminars dating back to Grenoble (1988), Leeds (1990), Old Saybrook (1993), Autrans (1996), Kloster Seeon (2000), Sydney (2003), Ubatuba (2006), and Strasbourg (2008). Several aspects of speech production will be covered, such as phonology, phonetics, linguistics, mechanics, acoustics, physiology, motor control, neurosciences and computer science.

For this edition, a special session will be organized in honor of Dr. Joseph Perkell, for his contribution to the field.

THE DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION IS NOVEMBER 15th, 2010. Technical details will be posted soon on the conference website (www.issp2011.uqam.ca).