prosodylab

paper on association with focus

Wagner, M. , M. Breen, E. Flemming, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel & E. Gibson (2010). Prosodic Effects of Discourse Salience and Association with Focus. To be presented at Speech prosody.

Three factors that have been argued to influence the prosody of an utterance are (i) which constituents encode discourse-salient information; (ii) which constituents are contrastive and evoke alternatives; and (iii) which constituents interact with the meaning of focus operators such as only (i.e., they ‘associate’ with focus). One challenge for a better understanding of the prosodic effects of these factors has been the difficulty of finding a way to evaluate hypotheses quantitatively, since individual variation in productions is often large enough to wash out experimental effects. In this paper, we apply a methodology introduced in Breen et al. (submitted) which regresses out subject and item variation, uncovering otherwise hidden prosodic patterns, and show how the three factors interact in sentences containing single or multiple foci.

cornell workshop on grammar induction

Cornell Workshop on Grammar Induction will bring together researchers from the fields of linguistics, psychology, and computer science who work on issues of learning and learnability in language. Our goal is to facilitate the exchange of ideas between researchers approaching similar problems with the perspectives and methodologies of diverse fields.

Date: 14-May-2010 - 16-May-2010

naphc 6

Sixth North American Phonology Conference:

A celebration of the 51st anniversary of the publication of Morris Halle’s The Sound Pattern of Russian (SPR). We invite papers (on any and all languages–not just Russian!) that address issues raised by the conditions on phonological theory proposed in SPR.

Concordia University, Montreal
April 30-May 2, 2010

Submission deadline: March 26, 2010

mcclu

This weekend, mcclue, McGill’s Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates, is taking place. It is organized by slum, the society of linguistics undergraduates at McGill.

phonology strikes back

After this week’s TOM (Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal Semantics Workshop) at McGill, the phonologists will have their say at next week’s MOT (Montreal-Ottawa-Toronto Phonology Workshop) at Carleton.

tom this saturday

More stuff going this week at McGill than just mg3: TOM, the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal workshop on semantics is taking place this Saturday. Here’s the program: TOM.

music and gesture 3

This weekend, the third conference on music and gesture will take place in Montreal this coming Friday and Saturday. Marcin Swoboda and I will be presenting on Encoding emotion: how performers manipulate tempo locally to convey affect.

The conference forms part of the musimars music festival, organized this year under the theme ‘gestural music–musical gesture.’ All throughout this week, there will be concerts and lectures at the Schulich School of Music.

paper on relative boundary strength

Here’s the revised version of our paper on gradient boundary strength and disambiguation, soon to be presented at speech prosody:

Wagner, Michael & Serena Crivellaro: Relative Prosodic Boundary Strength and Prior Bias in Disambiguation

Abstract: Previous research found that the relative rather than the absolute size of prosodic boundaries is crucial in disambiguating attachment ambiguities [1, 2]. Furthermore, relative categorical differences matter whereas merely quantitative ones do not [1]. This paper presents further evidence that relative boundary strength is indeed what is crucial, but, contrary to earlier findings, gradient quantitative differences in boundary rank affect parsing decisions in gradient ways. Furthermore, varying the plausibility of a given reading in a given context shifts the perceptual boundaries between different phrasings such that quantitatively stronger prosodic cues are necessary to counter-act a prior bias against it.

on linguistic interfaces II

The call for papers for the second conference on linguistic interfaces was posted. The deadline is April 30th. Here’s part of the conference description:

A full description of our knowledge of language must include reference to several different components, each with its own particular properties. These components must interact with each other, and with a lexicon, which we may think of as a system of stored associations between pieces of information pertaining to many of the above components. In recent years, the study of the interaction between these different levels of linguistic knowledge has attracted increasing interest. The nature and extent of the interaction of different linguistic modules is a central question to be addressed by a modern theory of linguistic knowledge. […]

deadline for tie extended

The deadline for TIE 4 in Stockholm was extended: The new deadline is February 22nd.