prosodylab

mcclu

McGill Canadian Conference for Linguistics Undergraduates

Submission Deadline: February 25 2011
Date: 11-Mar-2011 - 13-Mar-2011

Call for Papers

Conference Webpage

benchmarking academia

Malcolm Gladwell has an interesting article about college education rankings in the current New Yorker. The problem with college rankings, he argues, is that they try to accomplish too much at the same time: rank very different institutions along multiple dimensions. The effect is that decisions about the weighting of the different factors lead to very different rankings, and it is the interests or ideological biases of those who conduct the study and determine the weights.

extended deadline: psycholinguistics in san sebastian

The 10th International Conference for Psycholinguistics, to be held at the Basque Center for Cognitive Science in Sebastian, extended the deadline until December 21.

frown

Three weeks ago me and a good friend were standing in front a piece of art by Jon Pylypchuck at the museum of contemporary art in Montréal. The exhibition is still on until January 4th, and I recommend checking it out.

So looking at one of the faces, my friend asked the following question, which to me was very confusing:

"Do you think this is a frown or a moustache?"

does language shape thought?

You get to decide here.

non-recoverable deletion

A post on mindhacks reports on a 1974 study on writer’s block, replicated in 2007. The study has a lot of parallels with Fiengo & Lasnik’s 1972 squib in Linguistic Inquiry on unrecoverable deletion in syntax. I wonder in how many fields similar studies were published, and when it started.

scientific literacy

There have been two interesting blog posts on scientific literacy recently on the bps digest. The first addresses how to present findings in ways that minimizes a ‘scientific impotence response,’ where people discard scientific findings because they are incompatible with their world view by resorting to claiming that a certain topic cannot be properly studied scientifically. The second post discusses how one can try to present findings effectively in order to debunk pseudo-scientific beliefs.

deadline extended: international seminar on speech production

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 December 15th, 2010. Technical details will be posted soon on the conference website (www.issp2011.uqam.ca).

prosody and dr. syntax, 1832

There is an interesting series of articles in the new york times on the benefits and dangers of using large-scale corpora and statistical methods in the analysis of literary and other texts in the humanities. The first discusses some projects that are part of the digging-into-data challenge. The second article illustrates what race horses with conspicuous names can teach us about the pitfalls of the new windfall of data (hat-tip to Kate McCurdy).

the king's speech

A movie about King George VI is soon to be released in North America (December 10 in Canada), which centers around his stammer, and his successful way of dealing with it in a job that turned out to require lot of public speaking. He worked with speech pathologist Lionel Logue to overcome the problem. You can listen to a recording of a famous Christmas address of his given in 1939 here (it takes a little while before the recording starts playing).