prosodylab

two talks at mcgill on friday

Two talks on Friday, April 8 2011 at McGill within a block’s distance:

Cognitive Brownbag Seminar:
Elena Koulaguina & Rushen Shi (Uqam): Abstract rules, exceptions and morphological markings in early language acquisition

Time: 11:30-12:30pm
Location: S3/4 Stewart Bio

Special Edition of the GRIPP reading group:
Khalil Iskarous (Fullbright Fellow at CRLMB/Haskins): The Geometry of Statistics

Time: 12.45-2.15pm
Location: Rabinovitch 101/Boardroom, located at 3640 de la Montagne

mot program

The program for this year’s MOT in honor of Glyne Pigott is now posted.

Registration is now open. Note that if you want to attend the banquet, you’ll have to register by April 18.

You’ll find information about accommodation here.

richard aslin at mcgill

Richard Aslin (University of Rochester, USA) is giving a Hebb Colloquium tomorrow.

Time: 3.30pm.
Location: Room S1/3 in the Stewart Psychology Building at McGill.

The Dynamics of Information Processing in Infants: Eye-tracking and Neuroimaging.

Abstract: Infants are capable of rapidly learning the distributional properties of information in a wide variety of domains. This mechanism of statistical learning will be discussed in both the auditory (language) and visual domains, paying particular attention to the types of constraints that enable such learning to be tractable and efficient. Recently, we have asked whether infants prefer to attend to (and presumably process) information that is neither too simple nor too complex. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we provide evidence in support of this bias, which we call the Goldilocks effect. We have also been developing a non-invasive optical imaging method to assess the neural correlates of learning. Preliminary results provide insights about the relative weights attached to visual and auditory information in infants’ attention and learning.

prosody.lab at cuny

prosody.lab-related posters at cuny:

Hyekyung Hwang, Michael Wagner and Karsten Steinhauer: On word order, prosody, and focus. [abstract]

Efrat Pauker, Michael Wagner, Meghan Clayards, Hyekyung Hwang, Shari Baum and Karsten Steinhauer: Relative prosodic boundary strength and syntactic ambiguity resolution. [abstract]

Andrea Santi, Nino Grillo, Yosef Grodzinsky and Michael Wagner: Planned Production and Self-Paced Reading of Relative Clause Attachment. [abstract] [poster]

Michael Wagner: Studying Variation in the Lab with Larger Scale Production Experiments. [abstract] [poster]

Michael Wagner & Aron Hirsch: Prosodic Prominence in English Intransitive Sentences. [abstract] [poster]

workshop on argument structure

Structuring the Argument

A multidisciplinary workshop on the mental representation of verbal argument structure

Paris
5-7 of september 2011
(following Amlap)
Location: CNRS, Centre pouchet Paris 75017

Invited speakers:
John Beavers (University of Texas)
Alec Marantz (NYU)
Josep Quer (ICREA-Universitat Pompeu Fabra)
Jesse Snedeker (Harvard)
Cynthia Thompson (Northwestern)

Call for papers:
The aim of this workshop is to bring together scientists working in different fields and with different methodologies to discuss the mental representation of verbal argument structure. This topic has been addressed by work in a variety of fields (language and conceptual development, theoretical syntax and semantics, lexicology, linguistic typology, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, etc.). In this workshop we hope to create a cross-disciplinary platform to discuss ongoing research. We believe that an open exchange between scientists using different methods, working with different populations and within different theoretical frameworks will be of great benefit to the community. To this end we have invited speakers from different fields (language acquisition, neuro-imagery and aphasiology, theoretical syntax, theoretical semantics, sign language), each to be commented upon by a researcher from another discipline. A selection of papers presented in the workshop will be published in a special issue of Recherches linguistiques de Vincennes (RLV).

We invite submissions for 30min talks. We especially encourage submissions reporting inter-disciplinary (or inter-disciplinary motivated) work but will consider any submission (from any field) dealing with verbal argument structure. Sign language (LSF, BSL, ASL) interpreters will be available. Participation in the workshop is free.

Abstracts should be not longer than 500 words
Submissions:https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=strucarg2011
Abstract submission deadline: May 20th 2011
Notification: by june 15th 2011

Organizers:

Asaf Bachrach (CNRS)
Isabelle Roy (CNRS & Paris 8 )
Linnaea Stockall (Queen Mary, University of London)

two phonology workshops at the lsa

Testing Models of Phonetics and Phonology

Call for Posters
Deadline: May 1 2011
Conference Website

Workshop at the Linguistic Institute 2011: Language in the World
University of Colorado at Boulder
Wednesday, July 13th, 2011

This single day workshop aims to build connections between computational, experimental, and grammar-based research on phonetics and phonology. Studies using each of these general methodologies often have similar goals and produce mutually informing results, but they are usually presented in distinct journals and conferences, creating a barrier to their integration. The workshop brings together researchers in the areas of speech production, speech perception, and modeling of language acquisition.

Spoken Sessions:

• ‘The Balance Between the Gradient and the Discrete in Language Production’:

Gary Dell (U Illinois Urbana Champaign), ‘Implicit Learning of Artificial Phonotactic Patterns in the Production System: Connections to the Perceptual System and to Real Phonotactic Knowledge’
Matt Goldrick (Northwestern), ‘Gradient Symbol Processing in Speech Production’

• ‘Listener Adaptation to Variation’:

Jennifer Cole (U Illinois Urbana Champaign), ‘Modeling Listener Variability in Prosody Perception Using Transcription and Imitation as Indirect Measures of Linguistic Processing’
Meghan Sumner (Stanford), ‘Variation-driven Speech Perception’

• ‘Acquisition Biases and Typological Patterns’:

Andrew Wedel (U Arizona), ‘Extending Computational Models into the Laboratory: Usage Biases and the Development of Contrastive Phoneme Inventories’
Joe Pater (U Massachusetts Amherst), ‘Formally Biased Phonology: Complexity in Learning and Typology’

Organizers:

Matt Goldrick
Joe Pater
Meghan Sumner

Information-Theoretic Approaches to Linguistics
Conference Website

A wide range of research has shown that tools from information theory (e.g. information content/surprisal, entropy) are useful tools in addressing questions of linguistic interest. These range from predicting the targets and outcomes of phonological and syntactic processes, to explaining the cognitive bases for these processes, to evaluating models of linguistic data. A two-day NSF-funded workshop will bring together a number of researchers working on information-theoretic approaches to linguistics in an effort to share knowledge, tools, insights, and specific research findings. There will also be a tutorial on information theory for those not familiar with the approach. The tutorial will be followed by invited talks and a poster session.

Invited Speakers:

Petar Milin, University of Novi Sad, Serbia
John Goldsmith, University of Chicago
John Hale, Cornell University
Kathleen Currie Hall, CUNY: College of Staten Island & The Graduate Center
Elizabeth Hume, The Ohio State University
Florian Jaeger, University of Rochester
Roger Levy, UC San Diego
Fred Mailhot, The Ohio State University
Jason Riggle, University of Chicago
Andrea Sims, The Ohio State University
Adam Ussishkin, University of Arizona
Andrew Wedel, University of Arizona

etap 2: Prosody in Context

Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody (ETAP) 2

Prosody in Context

Where? McGill University, Montreal
When? September 23-25 2011

Contact: etap2011@gmail.com

Conference Website

Deadline for submissions: May 15 2011
Notification of acceptance: June 15 July 15 2011.

The second conference on Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody (ETAP) is taking place this coming September 23-25 at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. A special focus of this year’s ETAP are contextual influences on prosody. Examining the effects of context on the prosody of an utterance - for example, the context-dependent changes in the duration and prominence of different words or the grouping of words into larger prosodic/meaning units - provides a powerful tool for understanding syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse-level factors and their interplay in language production and comprehension. This conference aims at bringing together researchers from different disciplines who work on these issues.

Sara Mackenzie Talk

Sara Mackenzie is given a talk tomorrow in our Colloquium Series:

Sara Mackenzie (McGill University)

Time: 3.30pm
Place: Ferrier Building, room 456
Title: Ordering Restrictions in Aymara: the role of contrast and markedness

Aditi Lahiri and Henning Reetz at McGill

On March 18, Aditi Lahiri and Henning Reetz will be giving talks at McGill.

1.30pm CLRMB Distinguished Lecture
Rosalind and Morris Goodman Cancer Research Centre, Montreal
1160, av. des Pins Ouest, Room 501

Aditi Lahiri (Oxford University): WORDS: asymmetries in representation, processing and change

Abstract:
Language systems abound in asymmetries — in inventories, representations and rules. These asymmetries affect language processing and language change. For instance, it is most unusual to have equal number of consonant and vowel phonemes in any given language; languages has retroflex nasals also include dental/alveolar nasals.Velar obstruents become coronals in the context of high front vowels, but never the other way around; nuclear phrasal stress in a neutral sentence is always assigned on the last phonological phrase, never the first one. The question we raise in this talk is how are these asymmetries constrain phonological and morphological representations of WORDS in the mental lexicon, and how these constraints affect language processing and change. I will address asymmetries in various phonological domains: featural contrasts, morphophonological opacity and sentence phonology, providing theoretical and experimental evidence from behavioural as well as brain imaging studies in German, English and Bengali, covering both language comprehension as well language production planning.

crowdsourcing workshop

Talking about crowdsourcing, this looks like it’s going to be an interesting workshop at this years LSA institute:

Full Title: Crowdsourcing Technologies for Language and Cognition

Date: 27-Jul-2011 - 27-Jul-2011
Location: Boulder, Colorado, USA
Contact Person: Robert Munro
Web Site: http://www.crowdscientist.com/workshop/

Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics; Text/Corpus Linguistics

Call Deadline: 01-Mar-2011

Meeting Description:

This workshop will bring together linguists who are utilizing crowdsourcing technologies and those who want to know more about them. It combines a half-day ‘how-to’ session where participants will learn to conduct experiments using crowdsourcing platforms and a half-day workshop where researchers come together to share results, ideas, and strategies.

It is being held in conjunction with the 2011 LSA Summer Institute.

Call for Papers:

We are eliciting abstract submissions for afternoon presentations. They should present either:

a) Novel empirical results in linguistics or the language sciences that have been enabled by internet-based crowdsourcing technologies, or b) novel approaches to data collection and evaluation, especially when there are no ‘correct’ responses to a given stimuli. Crowdsourcing technologies could include technologies like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, CrowdFlower, online games, collaborative platforms like instant messaging and Wikipedia, or custom software built for collecting language and cognition data. Talk slots will be 10-15 minutes, depending on scheduling.

Please send 250-word abstracts to crowdscientistgmail.com by March 1st, 2011. Do not include author names or affiliations in the abstracts as reviewing will be blind (but list the authors and affiliations in the email itself). Abstracts can be in plain text or PDF. You may optionally include figures, tables and/or references. They will not count towards the 250 words, but please limit the entire submission to one page.