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Investigating the development of perceptual constancy through children's perception of foreign-accented speech
Time: Friday, March 02, 2012 11:00am - 12:00pm
Place: Speech and Hearing Building, Rm. C141
Tessa BentA listener's ability to perceive speech accurately despite the vast amount of variability in the speech signal is contingent on the flexibility of the speech perception system and its rapid tuning to novel input. Variability in the speech signal is introduced by factors such as a talker's dialect, gender, native language, age, and emotional state. Maintaining stable lexical access, therefore, requires perceptual constancy -- the ability to identify the same word across different speakers or acoustic realizations. The current studies investigate the development of perceptual constancy during preschool and middle childhood. Two experiments tested adults' and children's perception of foreign-accented words and sentences. Results demonstrated that children had less accurate word and sentence recognition than adults for both native- and foreign-accented stimuli. Both adults and children were less accurate at identifying foreign-accented words compared to native-accented words with children and adults showing similar decrements. Additionally, a number of factors were identified as relating to accurate perception of foreign-accented speech including children's age, vocabulary size, and naturalistic exposure. [Supported by NIDCD 1R21DC010027]
In category: Child language acquisition
Longitudinal infant speech perception in young cochlear implant users
Time: Friday, March 02, 2012 01:30pm - 03:00pm
Place: Psy 128 (conference room)
This week's Speech Perception seminar will feature a "journal club"-style discussion of the recent article Uhler et al. (2011) Longitudinal infant speech perception in young cochlear implant users, led by graduate student Kara Mouzin. Details for the article are given below. All are welcome to attend and participate in discussion of this work!Longitudinal infant speech perception in young cochlear implant usersK. Uhler, C. Yoshinaga-Itano, S.A. Gabbard, A.M. Rothpletz, & H. JenkinsJ. American Academy of Audiology, 22. 129-142.Purpose: This paper presents longitudinal case studies of children who received (cochlear implants) CIs and a controlled sample of children with normal hearing (NH). Phoneme discrimination (i.e., /sa-ma/, /a-i/, /a-u/, /u-i/, /ta-da/, /pa-ka/) was assessed prior to receiving CIs and monthly for 3 mo following CI activation.Research Design: Case studies.Study Sample: Three cochlear implant recipients and seven NH control participants were recruited through the University of Colorado Hospital and the University of Colorado, Boulder. Data Collection and Analysis: The study utilized the visual reinforcement audiometry and interactive play assessment of speech pattern contrasts (VRASPAC) algorithm. A comparison of scoring was conducted using Cohen's kappa to determine interrater reliability.Results: Findings from this study revealed that CI recipients could discriminate at least three out of five phoneme contrasts at mastery level ($90%) by 2 mo of device use. None of the CI recipients reached mastery prior to implantation. Following 3mo of CI use there was no difference in contrast discrimination performance between the CI users and their NH age-matched peers (with the exception of /pa-ka/ for one CI user).Conclusions: The CI users in this case study, who were implanted between 12 and 16 mo of age, were able to master the phoneme contrasts regardless of bilateral or unilateral CI, socioeconomic status, or language spoken at home.
An investigation of the interplay of phrase structure computations and semantic knowledge in L1-Korean L2-English sentence processing
Time: Friday, March 02, 2012 02:30pm - 04:00pm
Place: Ballantine Hall 208
Hyun-Kyoung Susan Seo The degree to which L2 processing depends on phrase structure computations constitutes the central research question to be addressed in the proposed dissertation. It will experimentally examine the working hypothesis that L2 sentence processing includes autonomous phrase-structure computations that nteract with various sources of semantic knowledge: syntax-semantics interface constraints, lexical semantic representations of verbs and knowledge of the world (cf. Clahsen & Felser, 2006a, inter alia). The hypothesis of autonomous phrase-structure computations explains a garden path effect with intransitive verbs in L2 processing first discussed in Juffs (2004). It seems that the garden path effect is mitigated by the lexical-semantic representation of verbs in the unaccusative versus unergative dimension. This interplay between lexical-semantics and syntax provides the backdrop for an investigation of the real-time integration of different sources of semantic information with syntax in L2 processing.
In category: Second language acquisition
The Role of Noun-Adjective Word Order on Several Aspects of Cognitive Representation and Judgment
Time: Friday, March 02, 2012 03:30pm - 04:30pm
Place: Psychology Building, Room 128
Elise Percy and Jim ShermanThis week will be the Elise and Jim show. Elise Percy and Jim Sherman will present an update of their work (in collaboration with Portuguese and Italian colleagues) on the role of language in mental representation and judgment. The focus of this work is on the effects of grammatical differences in noun-adjective word order between languages. Our early work focused on effects on conditional frequency judgments. Recent work investigates effects on similarity judgments, memory, accentuation, and Gestalt patterns. All results indicate a strong primacy effect of noun-adjective word order. However we need help understanding the results on impression tasks. The data are strong and in the opposite direction. We invite you to help us make sense of this. Please help us out.
In category: Morphosyntax and semantics
The Pragmatics of E-mail Discourse
Time: Friday, March 02, 2012 04:00pm - 05:15pm
Place: Ballantine Hall 228
IULC Colloquium SeriesThe Pragmatics of E-mail DiscourseCésar Félix-Brasdefer This talk examines social action from a pragmatic perspective in one particular type of discourse where both interlocutors (sender and receiver) negotiate meaning through networked environments, namely e-mail discourse. Unlike face-to-face interaction where meaning is negotiated through verbal and non-verbal communication at a physical setting, e-mail discourse represents a hybrid medium where joint social action (e.g. for the transmission of business and interpersonal meaning) occurs in virtual environments (Crystal 2006; Herring 2003). After a review of central topics investigated in e-mail discourse, I will present the results of an on-going project which examines various aspects of the pragmatics of e-mail discourse. Specifically, this talk examines variation at the pragmalinguistic and social levels (gender) when students issue various types of requests to their instructors via e-mail with different levels of imposition and instances of relational talk in academic settings. This talk ends with issues currently examined in computer-mediated discourse and directions for future research.
In category: Sociolinguistics and pragmatics
Methods of Presentation and Acquisition of Uzbek Regional Dialects
Time: Saturday, March 03, 2012 03:30pm - 05:15pm
Place: Woodburn Hall 119
Malik Hodjaev and Josh BererPart of the "Language, Symbols, and Power in Soviet and post-Soviet Eurasia" session of the Nineteenth Annual Association of Central Eurasian Students Conference on Central Eurasian StudiesSee http://www.indiana.edu/~aces/2012.php
Language Change in Progress: The Effect of Language Contact on the Phoneme Inventory of Central Eurasian Languages
Jonathan Washington, Niko Kontovas, and Andrew ShimunekPart of the "Language, Symbols, and Power in Soviet and post-Soviet Eurasia" session of the Nineteenth Annual Association of Central Eurasian Students Conference on Central Eurasian StudiesSee http://www.indiana.edu/~aces/2012.php
CLingDing: Computational Linguistics Hour
Time: Tuesday, March 06, 2012 11:00am - 12:00pm
Place: Memorial Hall (MM) 401
Scott Ledbetter & Markus DickinsonWe are developing a learner corpus of Hungarian, composed of student journals written at Indiana University. Our annotation marks learner errors, but defining the annotation for an agglutinative language presents several issues, most prominently a need to distinguish errors from secondary corrections. We report the annotation principles and scheme, as well as examples illustrating its functionality.
In category: Computational linguistics
Alignment in Natural Language Processing
Time: Tuesday, March 06, 2012 12:00pm - 01:00pm
Place: Lindley Hall, Rm. 101
Ikhyun Park Word or phrase alignment of parallel texts in two languages is a familiar task in natural language processing, especially as a step in training statistical machine translation systems. For languages that differ in terms of word order and in the way they express concepts, alignment is a hard problem. In this talk, I will discuss these difficulties and introduce a novel approach to tackling them, one that relies on multiple resources. http://emails.soic.indiana.edu/calendar/2012_3_Park_Ikhyun.pdf
Variable uses of the preterite and the imperfect
Time: Wednesday, March 07, 2012 01:30pm - 02:15pm
Place: BH 205
Department of Spanish & Portuguese Hispanic Linguistics Brown Bag SeriesUsos variables del pretérito y el imperfecto ['Variable uses of the preterite and the imperfect']Gibran Delgado-Díaz
Dyslexia: Overview, Implications, and Future Directions
Time: Friday, March 09, 2012 01:30pm - 03:00pm
Emily GarlDyslexia is a phonological disorder which is commonly diagnosed around ages 7 or 8, as a child is learning to read. This disorder is marked by delayed reading skills which are not explained by a child's IQ or motivation to learn to read. Dyslexia is thought to be a problem of phonological awareness which leads to impaired correspondence between phonemes and graphemes, therefore making the connection between spoken and written language very difficult. Often children show impaired phonological skills prior to this age, however many children are diagnosed at this point because of noted delays in learning to read. This diagnosis is most commonly associated with this 'trademark' reading impairment; however, dyslexia has been shown to have profound effects on speech perception as well.The future study will examine talker-identification, generalization, and speech perception abilities of dyslexic adults based off Perrachione et al's 2011 study coupled with Nygaard, Sommers, and Pisoni's 1994 study.
Dictogloss as Dynamic Assessment
Time: Friday, March 09, 2012 02:30pm - 04:00pm
Sun-Young Shin, Ryan Lidster, Stacy Sabraw, & Rebecca YeagerRecently, dynamic assessment (DA)--a term for assessing student performance not just from the end result but in a way that reflects the holistic process through mediation--has attracted increasing attention from researchers because of its demonstrated advantages in predictive validity over traditional standardized testing for second language learners (Poehner, 2007). Researchers such as Leung (2007) have called for this approach to testing to be applied to classroom assessment and learning activities, but DA remains largely untested in teaching contexts because of several logistical limitations (Poehner, 2009), notably that teachers cannot provide simultaneous one-to-one mediation to an entire class. In addition, to date, most DA research has been based on oral interaction but not other modes. In this vein, dictogloss--a collaborative text reconstruction task--can be a promising and practical tool for applying the principles of DA to classroom instruction. Dictogloss involves several stages of production and revision, from an initial individual listening task to pair or group work to reconstruct the text from their shared resources and teacher feedback on their co-constructed work. We address the way in which the dictogloss activity as a DA tool can be implemented into multimodal language learning courses for simultaneously assessing and enhancing students' grammatical and listening comprehension skills. We also analyze the effects of different pairing types on student performance in the dictogloss task, comparing partners of homogenous proficiency levels with heterogeneous partners. Preliminary findings from a pilot project suggest that dictogloss can serve as an effective assessment tool utilizing the core principles of DA, but that pair type has a strong effect on the success rate of peer mediation during the task, with homogenous pairs showing several benefits over heterogeneous pairings. The potential implications of these findings are discussed and a proposal for future research is presented.
The Morpho-Syntax and Pragmatics of Levantine Arabic Negation: A Synchronic and Diachronic Analysis
Time: Monday, March 19, 2012 10:00am - 11:00am
Place: Maple Room, IMU
Ahmad AlqassasThis Dissertation investigates the morphosyntax and pragmatics of Levantine Arabic negation. It shows that the complex distribution of the negation morphemes ma, la and-S is subject to morphosyntactic and pragmatic constraints. A minimalist analysis is developed to explain the morphosyntactic constraints. The pragmatic constraints are discussed within the contexts of Meta Linguistic negation and speech acts. Investigating the morphosyntax and pragmatics of negation, we reach an adequate explanation for the complex distribution of these negation morphemes. Moreover, we reach an accurate characterization for where LA negation stands according Jespersen Cycle, and we can explain a change in progress in LA negation. The distribution of the negative markers in different syntactic and phonological environments and the placement of sentential stress in negative sentences leads to the conclusion that the negative markers ma and Ia are heads (Neg0), while the morpheme -S is a morphological reinforcer without negative force (agreement clitic AgrPol0). The movement of the predicate through the AgrPolP and NegP heads creates a complex word that attracts sentential stress. The ungrammaticality of -S in some contexts can be explained if we assume that the position of negation in syntax is not parametric. In this approach, NegP can either be on top of vP or TP. I propose the NegP is on top of TP in syntactically and pragmatically marked cases. These include licensing of subject and adverbial NPOs, negative markers functioning as complementizers, negative imperative functioning as ' cautioning', rhetorical questions, and sentences which have a commissive speech act. Meta Linguistic negation is another phenomenon discussed here. An empirical study investigating the preference in using ma alone versus bipartite negation shows that there is an increasing preference for using ma along in the younger generations. This is interpreted as overgeneralizing the use of ma alone in unmarked constructions.A reception will be held immediately following in the Seminar Room (Memorial Hall 317).All faculty and graduate students are encouraged to attend. As a courtesy, if you are planning on attending, please send an e-mail to the chair of the dissertation committee, Steven Franks, to let him know you plan to be there.
Tell me when and why to do it! Run-time planner model updates via natural language instruction
Time: Tuesday, March 20, 2012 11:00am - 12:00pm
Rehj CantrellRobots are currently being used in and developed for critical HRI applications such as search and rescue. In these scenarios, humans operating under changeable and high-stress conditions must communicate effectively with autonomous agents, necessitating that such agents be able to respond quickly and effectively to rapidly-changing conditions and expectations. We demonstrate a robot planner that is able to utilize new information, specifically information originating in spoken input produced by human operators. We show that the robot is able to learn the pre- and postconditions of previously-unknown action sequences from natural language constructions, and immediately update (1) its knowledge of the current state of the environment, and (2) its underlying world model, in order to produce new and updated plans that are consistent with this new information. While we demonstrate in detail the robot's successful operation with a specific example, we also discuss the dialogue module's inherent scalability, and investigate how well the robot is able to respond to natural language commands from untrained users.
Second language acquisition and musical aptitude
Time: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 01:30pm - 02:15pm
Department of Spanish & Portuguese Hispanic Linguistics Brown Bag SeriesSecond language acquisition and musical aptitudeAllen Davis
Endangerment of the Mari Language: Myth or Reality?
Time: Wednesday, March 21, 2012 04:00pm - 05:15pm
Place: Ballantine Hall 244
Elena VedernikovaIn this lecture Dr. Vedernikova will address the historical evolution of the Mari language, a Finno-Ugric tongue spoken today in the central Volga region of the Russian Federation, including the impact of the first national stirrings in the late tsarist era, the achievements and challenges of the Soviet period, and especially developments in the past two decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Syntax Reading Group: Uttering Trees
Time: Thursday, March 22, 2012 01:00pm - 02:15pm
Place: Memorial Hall 317A
We will resume Syntax Reading Group right after the spring break and read Norvin Richards' Linguistic Inquiry monograph "Uttering Trees" (2010).[ http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12146 ]Sections to be discussed today:1. Introduction2. Distinctness2.1 Distinctness violations2.1.1 Multiple sluicing, multiple exceptives, even2.1.2 DP-internal arguments2.1.3 Causatives2.1.4 DP predication in predicate-initial languages2.1.5 English quotative inversion, locative inversion; French stylistic inversion2.2 The mechanics of distinctness2.2.1 Linear adjacency without distinctness220.127.116.11 Perception/causation verb passives, doubling, Italian double-infinitive filter18.104.22.168 Differential object marking
Discussion Over Doughnuts / Skills Sharing Workshop / IULC Meeting
Time: Friday, March 23, 2012 10:00am - 12:00pm
The IULC has planned a fun and exciting morning for you this Friday!From 10 to 10:30 AM, the "Discussion over Donuts" will be making a comeback. Stop by, enjoy some free refreshments from the IULC, and kick back with other students in the department!From 10:30 to 11 AM, we'll be introducing a brand-new event: an informal "Skills-Sharing Workshop". This month's topic will be on Google Scholar Alerts and LinguistList. Come and learn some valuable advice on how these tools can help you stay on top of the latest research published on whatever specific topics in Linguistics you are interested in. Bring your laptop so you can try it out yourself! And if you are avid users of either of these services, come and share your wisdom with everyone!From 11 AM to noon, we'll be holding an IULC open member meeting. Help us discuss ideas for what other Skills-Sharing Workshops you'd like to have, and also help us discuss our efforts to organize and make available the IULC's expansive linguistics library to graduate students like you!All events will be in the Seminar Room (Memorial Hall 317A). Feel free to pop in and attend whatever you can.The IULC
In category: Unclassified
Why Slovenian Orphans Receive Special Treatment
Time: Friday, March 23, 2012 04:00pm - 05:15pm
This talk combines research into the functional status of Slavic pronominal clitics as K(ase) heads and the curious case behavior of Slovenian adjectives in the so-called "Orphan Accusative" construction. In the absence of a nominal complement, masculine singular adjectives appear in the genitive rather than the expected accusative. This phenomenon is analyzed in terms of agreement with a pro-NP. Pro-NP is available because Slovenian "pronouns" need not be definite/referential and agreement with pro-NP is genitive because of a special morphological rule which, when there is no autonomous accusative form, points either to the nominative or to the genitive. Although usually resolved in terms of animacy, it is argued that the nominative option is unavailable here because Slavic lacks nominative pronouns. Finally, this account leads to a more finely grained understanding of the varied internal structures of South Slavic nominal projections, as they develop from NP to DP type languages.
Grammatical gender in Paraguayan Spanish
Time: Saturday, March 24, 2012 09:30am - 11:00am
Place: Maple Room, Indiana Memorial Union
Elizabeth HerringPart of the "Sociolinguistic variation" session of the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic Linguistics, Literature, and CultureSponsored in part by the Indiana University Linguistics Club
Variation in the radio broadcasts of Puerto Rico: The case of /s/ and /r/ implosives in three radio programs
Variación en las transmisiones radiales de Puerto Rico: el caso de /s/ y /r/ implosivas en tres programas de radio('Variation in the radio broadcasts of Puerto Rico: The case of /s/ and /r/ implosives in three radio programs')Iraida GalarzaPart of the "Sociolinguistic variation" session of the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic Linguistics, Literature, and CultureSponsored in part by the Indiana University Linguistics Club
A sociolinguistic analysis of intervocalic /b/ in Caracas speech
Lisa Baldwin and Avizia Yim LongPart of the "Sociolinguistic variation" session of the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic Linguistics, Literature, and CultureSponsored in part by the Indiana University Linguistics Club
Time: Saturday, March 24, 2012 11:15am - 12:30pm
Place: Dogwood Room, Indiana Memorial Union
K. Allen DavisKeynote speech for the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic Linguistics, Literature, and CultureSponsored in part by the Indiana University Linguistics Club
The acquisition of future time expression by adult learners of Spanish
Time: Saturday, March 24, 2012 01:30pm - 03:00pm
Megan SolonPart of the "Syntax/Morphology" session of the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic Linguistics, Literature, and CultureSponsored in part by the Indiana University Linguistics Club
A preliminary characterization of Amazonian Spanish: Some syntactic phenomena
Miguel Rodríguez-Mondoñedo and Stephen FafulasPart of the "Syntax/Morphology" session of the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic Linguistics, Literature, and CultureSponsored in part by the Indiana University Linguistics Club
Testing the Precedence Constraint in L1 English near-natives of L2 Spanish
Juan Pablo CominguezPart of the "Syntax/Morphology" session of the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic Linguistics, Literature, and CultureSponsored in part by the Indiana University Linguistics Club
Stress and position effects in /s/-voicing assimilation in the Spanish of the Basque Country
Time: Saturday, March 24, 2012 03:15pm - 04:45pm
Beatriz Sedó del CampoPart of the "Phonology" session of the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic Linguistics, Literature, and CultureSponsored in part by the Indiana University Linguistics Club
In category: Phonetics and phonology
An acoustic analysis of the effects of syllable type on heritage Spanish vowel production
Rebecca RonquestPart of the "Phonology" session of the Ninth Annual Graduate Student Conference on Luso-Brazilian and Hispanic Linguistics, Literature, and CultureSponsored in part by the Indiana University Linguistics
The communicative basis of word order
Time: Monday, March 26, 2012 04:00pm - 05:00pm
Place: Psychology 101
Ted GibsonSome recent evidence suggests that subject-object-verb (SOV) may be the default word order for human language. For example, SOV is the preferred word order in a task where participants gesture event meanings (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Critically, SOV gesture production occurs not only for speakers of SOV languages, but also for speakers of SVO languages, such as English, Chinese, Spanish (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008) and Italian (Langus & Nespor, 2010). The gesture-production task therefore plausibly reflects default word order independent of native language. However, this leaves open the question of why there are so many SVO languages (41.2% of languages; Dryer, 2005). We propose that the high percentage of SVO languages cross-linguistically is due to communication pressures over a noisy channel (Jelinek, 1975; Brill & Moore, 2000; Levy et al. 2009). In particular, we propose that people understand that the subject will tend to be produced before the object (a near universal cross-linguistically; Greenberg, 1963). Given this bias, people will produce SOV word order – the word order that Goldin-Meadow et al. show is the default – when there are cues in the input that tell the comprehender who the subject and the object are. But when the roles of the event participants are not disambiguated by the verb, then the noisy channel model predicts either (i) a shift to the SVO word order, in order to minimize the confusion between SOV and OSV, which are minimally different; or (ii) the invention of case marking, which can also disambiguate the roles of the event participants. We test the predictions of this hypothesis and provide support for it using gesture experiments in English, Japanese and Korean. We also provide evidence for the noisy channel model in language understanding in English.
Multilingual Coreference Resolution with UBIU (Used Coreference Resolution System)
Time: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 11:00am - 12:00pm
Desislava (Desi) ZhekovaThis talk will introduce my work on multilingual coreference resolution. I will shortly present the two shared tasks that UBIU (the used coreference resolution system) participated or will participate into and guide you stepwise through the coreference resolution process and its specifics within the UBIU system. Mostly I will focus on mention identification, feature extraction, classification, and evaluation.
The development of sociopragmatic and sociocultural competence in a foreign language: Communicating Emotions
Time: Thursday, March 29, 2012 05:30pm - 06:30pm
Jean-Marc Dewaele In this lecture I will present an overview of the recent surge of interest in the field of emotion and multilingualism. I will focus on the development of sociopragmatic and sociocultural competence, and more specifically on the communication of emotion in a foreign language. I will also consider the effects of age of onset of acquisition, of type of foreign language instruction and of current language use on the communication of emotion and on affective variables in the foreign language.
The Greatest Show on Earth: The Use of Animals in Language Research
Time: Friday, March 30, 2012 01:30pm - 03:00pm
Place: Psychology 128 (conference room)
J. D. Trout (Loyola University Chicago)Two millennia after Pliny the Elder chronicled the amusing mimicry of magpies and Indian parakeets in Rome's Coliseum, the idea of animals using spoken language continues to captivate audiences. From Noam Chomsky to Steven Pinker, from Aristotle to Eric Lenneberg, linguists, psychologists, biologists and philosophers have examined the uniquely human character of language. This is a controversial topic, and recently scholars have argued – on the basis of elaborate animal experiments -- that animals as diverse as chimps (like Panzee), chinchilla, and quail, have ancient "pre-adaptations" for spoken language perception and production in their auditory systems, and thus we can easily explain how humans acquired the capacity for processing spoken language. I am doubtful about this claim of common ancestry in language. The methodological problems surely sink most of this research, but it remains buoyant in an unseemly gumbo of media voyeurism and academic grantsmanship. The experiments captivate the public with headlines like "Sit. Stay. Parse. Good Girl!" and suggest that the remarkable responses of a border collie named Chaser "may help explain how children acquire language" (NYT, January 17, 2011). These experiments have the irresistible allure of all circus acts, in which (in this case) animals perform linguistic stunts for an audience whose critical scrutiny has been disarmed by the spectacle. In order to balance the allure of these animal displays, I try to slow the caravan by proposing to researchers a number of questions to address whenever the news peg pivots on the linguistic capacities of nonhuman animals. Is the demonstrated capacity the result of a biological homology or analogy? Was it a language task or a memory task? What proportion of test animals didn't reach desired performance levels? What would positive findings actually show? I will then provide crisp and captivating examples of speech phenomena that illustrate the uniqueness of speech.
Probability smoothing for NLP: A case study for functional programming and little languages
Time: Tuesday, April 03, 2012 11:00am - 12:00pm
Wren ThorntonDesigning functional libraries is a balancing act. To be effectively functional, the API must be declarative and intuitive to work with (e.g., eschewing side-effects which destroy the ability to reason locally). To be an effective library, it must not lose efficiency over hand-written code, or else efficiency-minded users will avoid it. In the field of modeling this tension is especially acute: on the one hand we'd like to separate models from the algorithms on them, but on the other hand efficiency is paramount. As a consequence, state-of-the-art modeling code typically forsakes functional clarity in pursuit of efficiency--- for example, by interleaving the choice of smoothing for probabilistic models with the algorithms which work over that model, since doing so allows for loop-invariant code motion (LICM) which can reduce algorithmic complexity. In this talk I will present an embedded domain-specific language (EDSL) which enables us to capture probabilistic models declaratively ---thereby reducing bugs in modeling code---, while simultaneously retaining the separation of concerns between models and algorithms ---by performing LICM dynamically.
Domain-general mechanisms for learning word-referent mappings: Empirical and modeling evidence
Time: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 12:10pm - 01:10pm
Place: PY 128 (Psychology conference room)
George KachergisAssociative learning has been meticulously studied in many species, and diverse effects have been explained using a handful of basic assumptions and mechanisms. Human language acquisition proceeds remarkably quickly and is of great interest, but is arguably more difficult to capture under the microscope. Nonetheless, empirical investigations have led researchers to theorize a variety of language learning principles and constraints. While there may indeed be language-specific learning mechanisms that are distinct from more universal associative learning mechanisms, I seek to explain some basic principles of language acquisition using domain-general mechanisms. Using a model and several empirical findings, I show how the principles of mutual exclusivity--an assumption of 1-to-1 word-object mappings, contrast, and other constraints related to fast mapping nouns may result from attention mechanisms attributed to associative learning effects such as blocking and highlighting. However, unlike other associative models, the model I propose has selective attention directed by simple competing biases for familiar pairs and for uncertain stimuli. Given sufficient time and audience interest, I can address how the model accounts for effects resulting from varied pair frequency, contextual diversity, temporal contiguity, illusory correlation, and active learning.
A cross-sectional study of the effects of discourse cohesiveness and perseveration on subject expression in second language Spanish
Time: Wednesday, April 04, 2012 01:30pm - 02:15pm
Kimberly L. Geeslin and Bret LinfordForms of subject expression in Spanish are one of the most widely studied areas in variationist research. Researchers have discovered that many factors (both linguistic and sociolinguistic) influence the variation between overt and null subject forms (Avila-Jiménez 1994; Bayley & Pease-Álvarez 1996; Cameron 1994, 1995; Cameron & Flores-Ferrán 2004; Enríquez 1984; Erker 2005; Flores-Ferrán 2005; Hochberg 1986; Morales 1986; Otheguy, Zentella & Livert 2007; Shin 2006; Shin & Cairns 2009; Shin & Otheguy 2009; Silva-Corvalán 1994; Travis & Torres-Cacoullos 2010). Among these, some of the most influential factors are Discourse Cohesiveness, which accounts for factors that make discourse more or less cohesive, including the form and distance of the previous mention of the referent and the (dis)continuity of TMA (Bayley and Pease-Álvarez 1997; Paredes Silva 1993), and Perseveration, which accounts for the tendency for the form of the previous mention of the referent to influence the next subject form produced (Cameron, 1994; Cameron & Flores-Ferrán 2004; Flores-Ferrán 2005). Similarly, research on the second language acquisition of subject form use has shifted from an error analysis to an analysis of the frequency with which learners use a grammatical form and the factors that influence such use. Research on a variety of variable structures has shown that depending on the form under examination, even advanced non-native speakers (NNSs) may differ from native speakers (NSs) in the frequency of use of a form (Geeslin & Gudmestad 2008), the factors that predict use (Linford 2009) and/or the degrees of strength with which these factors operate (Geeslin & Gudmestad 2008, 2010). In fact, previous research on forms of subject expression has shown that both NSs and NNSs demonstrate similar effects for the variables Discourse Cohesiveness and Perseveration but significantly different frequencies of use of null subject forms (Geeslin & Gudmestad 2011). Although variationist methods of analysis have been used to determine stages of acquisition for some variables structures (e.g., Geeslin 2000), developmental research does not exist for the forms of subject expression. Thus, the current study was designed to further examine the frequency and predictors of forms of subject expression by NSs and NNSs at a variety of proficiency levels in order to examine development in the use of this variable structure.The current study employs an elicitation method in which the features of the discourse context are highly-controlled in order to isolate the effects of the linguistic and individual variables under examination. The participants of the current study were 20 NSs and 120 NNSs of Spanish who completed three tasks: a background questionnaire, a proficiency test, and a written contextualized task that manipulated the degree of Discourse Cohesiveness and the form of the previous referent while at the same time controlling the person and number of the referents (all 3 rd person singular referents), the clause type (all items found in main clauses), and the TMA of the verbs (all in either simple present or imperfect). The NNSs come from 6 levels of enrolment, including third semester, fourth semester, intermediate composition, advanced undergraduate and graduate courses. Results for all learner groups and for the NSs were analyzed in terms of frequency of selection of each subject form as well as the degree to which the two variables examined in the current study were shown to influence selection of those forms. Preliminary results show that even when discourse is tightly controlled there are significant differences in frequency of selection of forms across levels of proficiency and between the most advanced group and the NSs. Nevertheless, learners do acquire sensitivity to the same discourse factors that predict NS subject form selection.
Computer-based perceptual training as a major component of adult instruction in a foreign language
Time: Friday, April 06, 2012 02:30pm - 04:00pm
Charles S. Watson, James D. Miller, Ward Morrow, and Gary KiddMillions of adult learners have acquired good-to-excellent literacy in English, but most of them continue to have difficulty with oral communication in that language. The more obvious of their problems is with pronunciation, which varies from just noticeably "foreign" to very difficult to understand. Less apparent, but possibly fundamental to their overall skill level in English, is their difficulty in recognizing the spoken sounds, words, and phrases of that language. Contemporary research has shown that adults are capable of learning to perceive a new language quite accurately, through systematic training. Perceptual skills acquired through such training are likely to contribute to continuing improvement in pronunciation and to an increasing vocabulary. Such a training program is described in this presentation, the Speech Perception Assessment and Training Program for ESL (SPATS-ESL). After 20-30 hours of training with this program, most advanced ESL students are shown to achieve near-native or native-like recognition of the sounds of English and of words in sentences spoken at normal conversational rates in a background of multi-talker babble.
Perception of foreign accent in Spanish by native and nonnative listeners
Time: Friday, April 06, 2012 03:00pm - 04:00pm
Place: BH 148
Elena Schoonmaker-GatesPrevious research on the perception of foreign accent has focused on the ratings of native and near-native listeners and few studies have explored the perception of degree of foreign accent by nonnative listeners, despite the fact that it could shed light on what language learners perceive as foreign-accented and potentially tell us about their developing system. The present dissertation aims to investigate the perception of degree of foreign accent in Spanish by both native and nonnative listeners, exploring the effects of various listener-specific characteristics, including proficiency, on listeners'perception. This thesis also explores the role of VOT and speech rate in nonnative listeners' perception of foreign accent in Spanish, two cues that have been found to influence native listeners' perception of foreign-accented English in previous studies.In order to accomplish these goals the read speech of 2 native and 2 nonnative Spanish speakers, in addition to 11 distracter speakers, was recorded and Praat's duration tool was used to create VOT and rate-modified versions of the read sentences. A total of 26 native speakers and 140 nonnative learners of Spanish heard and rated 210 modified and unmodified utterances on a 9-point scale of degree of foreign accent. The statistical analyses revealed significant differences between native and nonnative listeners' ratings of unmodified speech. In the analyses that compared listener ratings of modified and unmodified utterances, both sets of listeners rated speech as more accented when it had longer (less native-like) VOTs and when it was slower. Conversely, listeners also rated nonnative speech as less foreign-accented when it was reproduced with shorter VOTs and at a faster rate. A number of listener-specific factors including proficiency, course enrollment, pronunciation training, comprehension, and native dialect exposure were also found to be significant predictors of listeners' foreign accent perception. The results show that both linguistic and listener characteristics affect the perception of foreign accent by native and nonnative listeners of Spanish, and that contrary to previous findings these two listener groups do not necessarily perceive degree of foreign accent the same.
Speaker-independent perception of human speech by songbirds
Time: Saturday, April 07, 2012 11:50am - 12:20pm
Place: Student building, Room 150
Verena Ohms Department of Biology, Indiana University One of the most important characteristics of human speech is our ability to recognize speech sounds produced by different speakers independent of audible differences between voices and sexes. Scientists have attributed this to the human capacity for intrinsic and extrinsic speaker normalization. Intrinsic speaker normalization accounts for the fact that sounds which are perceived as the same phoneme can have different acoustic realizations by assuming that every speech sample can be categorized using a normalizing transformation. At the same time it is well known that there is a speaker effect on speech perception which might initially hamper discrimination across speakers. This difficulty, however, is overcome by establishing a reference frame from different speech sound samples. Using operant conditioning techniques we trained zebra finches to discriminate between the two naturally produced words 'wit' and 'wet' which differ in their vowels sounds and hence mainly in their formant patterns. When confronted with unfamiliar voices of both the same and the opposite sex the birds were still able to discriminate between the two words and categorize them independent of speaker identity. Our analysis revealed that the essential feature enabling categorization was the different formant patterns and that the birds, just like humans, employed a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic speaker normalization to accomplish the task. This result indicates that the way formants are perceived is either widely spread in the animal kingdom or evolved convergently in birds and humans. Part of the "Symposium on Animal Cognition" of the 19th Annual Animal Behavior Conference.Other talks on animal communication:* Repertoire size and phrase variation in the song of the Bell's Vireo (vireo bellii) in southern Indiana* Transmission and reception of structurally distinct song phrases in the White-Crowned Sparrow* Songbird frequency selectivity and temporal resolution vary with sex and season* Differences in female- and male-directed song in brown-headed cowbirds (molothrus ater)* Effects of habitat and urbanization on the active space of brown-headed cowbird song* Does the Gray squirrel's response to heterospecific alarm calls depend on familiarity or similarity?* Conspecific communication functions of vibrational signals produced by immatures of treehopper tylopela gibbera (hemiptera membracidae)* Mating songs of parasitized cricket populations: Sexy but dangerousSee [ http://www.indiana.edu/~animal/conference/2012%20ABConf%20Program.pdf ] for more details.
Bilingual Children with Primary Language Impairment: Profile and Treatment Studies
Time: Friday, April 13, 2012 11:00am - 12:00pm
Place: Speech and Hearing, C141
Kathryn KohnertThis talk is focused at the intersection of bilingualism, primary language impairment and cognitive processing skills. Approximately 20% of the U.S. population over age 5 speaks a language other than English at home (U.S. Bureau of Census, 2000); more than five million children in U.S. public schools learn English as their second language (NEA, 2009). Primary language impairment (PLI, also known as SLI or specific language impairment) is a high incidence, chronic developmental condition presumed due to innate factors interacting with language-learning demands. PLI is characterized by significant delays in language in the face of otherwise typical development. For bilingual children with PLI, both languages are affected. Although low language is the defining feature in PLI and the focus of conventional assessments, subtle nonlinguistic cognitive processing weaknesses are well-documented in monolingual children with PLI. Cognitive and language profiles of bilingual children with and without PLI have the potential to advance basic understanding of the PLI phenotype which, in turn, provides critical direction for clinical services. Cognitive and language treatment studies with bilingual children with PLI can speak to the nature of cross-domain and cross-language relations and advance evidence-based practice. I will describe methods and results from recent profile and in-progress treatment studies with bilingual learners with PLI.
Projections above NP in Mandarin
Time: Friday, April 13, 2012 01:15pm - 01:45pm
Place: Ballantine Hall 007
Yu-Yin HsuMy point of departure is Boškovic's (2005) generalization that adjunct extraction is never allowed in DP languages such as English (1a), but it is allowed in NP languages such as Serbo-Croatian (1b). Although proponents of the DP/NP analysis often treat Mandarin as a NP language based on the fact that no overt article is available in Mandarin, we can see that Mandarin behaves in the same way as English, with respect to the ability of extracting adjuncts: example (2) shows that an adjective can never be extracted in Mandarin. If Mandarin is analyzed as a NP language, one may wonder why it behaves like English but never like NP languages. In this paper, I would like to show that nominals in Mandarin involve a syntactic structure larger than Noun Phrase.Following the view of de-phrases as ModifierPhrases (see Tang (2005), Hsieh (2005) and Paul (2005)), I argue that possessive-de phrases are not genitively Case marked possessors, but rather are possessive adjective phrases. Along this line of analysis, possessive-de phrases are APs, and thus, extraction is banned (3). Furthermore, when a possessor occurs in a nominal, the binding relation and restriction are observed, just like English (4). Next, I will argue that demonstratives and the indefinitive marker, you 'exist', belong to the determiner category that heads a projection similar to DP in English, and that between DP and NP, classifier is the head of a unit phrase, referred as Classifier Phrase. The proposal is supported by facts of nominal coordination. Aoun and Li (2003) argue that coordinators in Chinese show different categorial restrictions: jian 'and' connects two NPs, erqie 'and' coordinates two CPs or adjectives, and he 'and' connects two DPs. Example (5) shows that when two phrases lower than the classifier are coordinated, jian 'and' is used but not other coordinators (5a). Nonetheless, when two conjuncts have demonstratives, only he 'and' is used (5b).http://www.indiana.edu/~iulc/images/2012ConferenceAbstracts/1%20yu-yin%20hsu.pdf
Demonstrative-blocking in complex NPs in Guianese French Creole
Time: Friday, April 13, 2012 01:45pm - 02:15pm
Jason SiegelGuianese French Creole is unique among Atlantic French-based Creoles in having a DP-initial demonstrative determiner and a DP-final definite determiner, which must co-occur in demonstrative constructions (e.g. sa chen-an 'that dog', literally 'that dog the'). However, in at least the Cayenne dialect, the demonstrative sa is blocked in some complex DPs (*sa joujou timoun-an 'that toy of the child', literally 'that toy child the'). Such a restriction is not predicted by surface or memory constraints such as NP weight, as some long NPs with embedded relative clauses readily permit the determiner. Building off a proposal from Déprez (2007), which states that French-based creoles derive the order of their determiners from movement within a highly specified DP, as well as an analysis by Lumsden (1989), which states that Haitian Creole determiners in complex DPs have scope over only the most embedded NP, I propose that restrictions on sa come from a requirement that it be immediately dominated underlyingly by a definite determiner. Using this proposal, I also explore the possible etymologies of the plural demostrative sé, usually claimed to come from the creoles of the French Antilles, though it could possibly be borrowed directly from French.http://www.indiana.edu/~iulc/images/2012ConferenceAbstracts/2%20jason%20siegel.pdf
Developing L2 Pragmatics
Time: Friday, April 13, 2012 02:30pm - 04:00pm
Kathleen Bardovi-HarligL2 Pragmatics attempts to balance the sometimes conflicting and sometimes compatible research traditions and goals of second language acquisition and pragmatics. For example, empirical L2 pragmatics addresses increasingly social definitions of pragmatics and continues to hone comparisons of tasks and conversation; in contrast, task effects attributable to planning and potential for accessing explicit knowledge have not yet been investigated. In this paper, development in the field of L2 pragmatics is assessed through 1) investigation of task effects for characteristics of conversation and tasks which simulate conversation (Bardovi-Harlig, 2010), 2) investigation of task effects resulting from planning time, mode, and activities which may increase learners' potential to draw on explicit knowledge; 3) progress in measuring change in pragmatic systems (Kasper & Schmidt, 1996); 4) tracking the development of interlanguage as a pragmalinguistic resource, and 5) understanding treatment effects including both instructional studies and study abroad experiences.
Rhythmic patterns of prominence in Akan/Twi
Time: Friday, April 13, 2012 02:30pm - 03:00pm
Jonathan AndersonIn phonological theory, rhythm is described as the appearance of alternating patterns of prominent elements, e.g. alternating stressed syllables. However, metrical patterns are not so apparent in languages without stress or accent. In particular, how rhythm appears in tone languages without stress/accent is poorly understood. This study explores the rhythmic timing patterns of prominent elements in Akan/Twi, a West African tone language thought to be syllable-timed (Obeng, 1987), using the Speech Cycling Task (Cummins & Port, 1998; Port, 2003; Tajima & Port, 2003). In the Speech Cycling Task, speakers are asked to repeat a phrase several times along with a metronome. Prominent elements, such as stressed syllables in English or word-final syllables in Japanese, tend to occur at simple harmonic phases of 1/3, 1/2, and 2/3 of the fixed metronome period. These positions within the period are termed attractors and previous studies have shown that prominent syllables not only have a tendency to align in time with the attractors, but that these syllables also resist temporal displacement (Cummins, 1997; Tajima, 1998; Tajima, Zawaydeh, & Kitahara, 2001).In this work, an experiment was devised to understand the prominence relations between syllables in Akan. As the previous literature suggests, all syllables in Akan have equal prominence in both their phonological representation, as well as their production (Abakah, 2005). The first hypothesis tested whether specific syllables in a phrase will align near 1/2 of the repetition period given a two-beat pattern. The second hypothesis was that syllables aligning with 1/2 would align with a different simple harmonic phase given a three-beat pattern. This is empirically verifiable by checking which syllables exhibit the tendency to occur at simple harmonic phases, which were controlled by manipulating the clicks of the metronome to occur at 1/2 of the period (a two-beat pattern), and 1/3 and 2/3 of the period (a waltz-like pattern). Subjects were instructed to align the first syllable of the phrase with the first click of the metronome. This task forces speakers to align prominent elements within the phrase with the clicks of the metronome, which are fixed to the simple harmonic phases. The data include four speakers asked to repeat a phrase eight times along with a metronome whose rate was fixed. The speech materials included 60 phrases ranging from 4-6 syllables in length and four tone melodies (H, L, HL, and LH). Tone was included as a condition since it also hypothesized that H toned syllables will be more prominent. Results show two patterns of rhythmic entrainment in the two-beat condition. In the first pattern, final syllables of four and five syllable phrases, and the penultimate phrase of six syllable phrases occur near 1/2. In the second pattern, syllables were added to phrases lengthening the phrase by that duration. The phrases in the three-beat condition were repeated with the second pattern. Furthermore, both H and L toned syllables occurred near simple harmonic phases. Implications for the stress-timing/syllable-timing dichotomy and how tonal melodies affect rhythmic patterns are also discussed.http://www.indiana.edu/~iulc/images/2012ConferenceAbstracts/3%20jonathan%20anderson.pdf
Projecting Farsi POS data to tag Pashto
Time: Friday, April 13, 2012 03:00pm - 03:30pm
Mohammad Khan, Eric Baucom, Anthony Meyer, and Lwin MoeWe present our findings on projecting part of speech (POS) information from a well-resourced language, Farsi, to help tag a lower resourced language, Pashto, following Feldman and Hana (2010). We make a series of modifications to both tag transition and lexical emission parameter files generated from a hidden Markov model tagger, TnT, trained on the source language (Farsi). Changes to the emission parameters are immediately effective, whereas changes made to the transition information are most effective when we introduce a custom tagset. We reach our best results of 70.84% when we employ all emission and transition modifications to the Farsi corpus with the custom tagset.http://www.indiana.edu/~iulc/images/2012ConferenceAbstracts/khan%20et%20al.pdf
Stress and Weight Management: Egyptian Loanword Adaptation of English Words
Time: Friday, April 13, 2012 03:45pm - 04:15pm
Elijah ReynoldsThe present study provides evidence for a bimoraic word minimality constraint operating in Egyptian Arabic. The motivation for an analysis of Egyptian Arabic loanword adaptations is that it provides us with empirical data of "constraints that cannot be motivated by native language alternations because the relevant structural types do not occur in the native vocabulary", (Broselow, 2006). The purpose of this paper is twofold: 1) To identify the suprasegmental adaptation strategies observed in Egyptian Arabic borrowings from English monosyllabic words that violate the native syllable structure and prosodic constraints. 2) To provide an analysis of an Egyptian minimal word constraint of bimoraicity found during adaptation of underweight CVC English loanwords. The observed phenomena are based on a subset of 40 monosyllabic English loanwords into Egyptian Arabic; polysyllabic borrowings are presented for comparison. The preferred adaptation strategy of CVC loanwords into Egyptian Arabic is found to be gemination of word-final C as a phonological process, while vowel lengthening is viewed as a perceptual-mapping of phonemic categories at the phonetic-phonology interface. Demands at suprasegmental levels such as stress patterns and syllable weight play a major role in the sequencing of elements at the segmental level. Focusing on monosyllabic loanwords, we observe the interaction of segmental and suprasegmental constraints. The results of the analysis support Davis's (1999, 2003) claim that geminates are underlyingly moraic. The present study contributes to the phonetics versus phonology debate over loanword adaptations, as well as the phonology of Arabic dialects.http://www.indiana.edu/~iulc/images/2012ConferenceAbstracts/4%20elijah%20reynolds.pdf
Learners' lexical encoding of the geminate/non-geminate contrast in Japanese and its implications
Time: Friday, April 13, 2012 04:15pm - 04:45pm
Chisato KojimaLearners of Japanese often have difficulties acquiring the contrast between geminates and non- geminates (kata "shoulder" vs. katta "bought"). We examine the degree to which this contrast is encoded in learners' lexical representations. Advanced (N=14) and intermediate (N=9) learners, along with native speakers of Japanese (N=11), were tested on two categorization tasks and one lexical decision task: (i) A classical ABX task probing the distinction between geminates and non-geminates, (ii) An ABX task where listeners had to ignore the length distinction (i.e. geminate or non-geminate), and (iii) A lexical decision task examining learners' lexical representations. The results of (i) and (ii) revealed learners could discriminate the geminate contrasts even at the beginning level with very high accuracy. Moreover, advanced learners could successfully ignore length while native speakers had a hard time ignoring it. However, the results of (iii) revealed that advanced learners' accuracy was higher than the beginning learners in all types of stimuli. Furthermore, native speakers' accuracy in perception was not affected by the interactive effects of the stimuli's lexical status and stimuli type, but learners' accuracy was influenced by these effects. Given the fact that learners could discriminate geminates from non-geminates when engaged in ABX tasks, these results overall indicate a clear dissociation between the ability to discriminate geminates from non-geminates and the ability to encode this difference in long-term lexical representations. In terms of second language teaching, these results suggest that listening practice might be helping students to distinguish the two sounds but that it is not sufficient to store the L2 contrast in their brains. Besides the level of proficiency relevant for lexical encoding, future research is required to reveal what kind of exposure or practice facilitates or accelerates L2 lexical encoding, which in turn leads students to be more proficient in the language. http://www.indiana.edu/~iulc/images/2012ConferenceAbstracts/5%20chisato%20kojima.pdf
Acoustic feedback and speech production
Time: Friday, April 13, 2012 04:45pm - 05:15pm
Elizabeth Casserly Phoneticians and psychologists tend to think of language users as either speakers or hearers, depending on whether one is studying speech production or speech perception. But in reality we are all listeners and talkers simultaneously, and our perception plays an important role in the production of speech. Speakers adjust their production style when they hear themselves in a noisy environment and when they get weak acoustic feedback (Lane & Tranel, 1971), and experimental perturbation of particular acoustic feedback cues, such as f0 or vocalic F1/F2, causes speakers to alter the acoustic phonetics of their speech in response (Burnett et al., 1998; Houde & Jordan, 1998). In this experiment, a portable, real-time vocoder (PRTV) was used to investigate the effects of a novel global transformation of speech feedback. The device captures acoustic signals and alters them in a simulation of the processing done by cochlear implants (Casserly et al., 2011). As a result, spectral resolution is degraded substantially (see Fig. 1) and very high- and low-frequency signals are eliminated (cf. Shannon et al., 1995). We hypothesized that the substantial loss in phonetic detail, particularly for fine-grained frequency contrasts, would have a substantial impact on speech production (cf. Matthies et al, 1996; Lane et al., 2007), and shed new light on the interaction between speech perception and production in normal language use. Speech samples were recorded from seven subjects, both under normal speaking/listening conditions and while wearing the PRTV. In each condition, speakers produced a short passage, 12 "phoneme specific sentences" (Huggins & Nickerson, 1985), 16 sentences with contrasting prosodic focus, and 114 English words in isolation, containing 10 tokens each of [i, æ, ɑ, u], 16 of [s, ʃ] and 8 of [p, t, k]. Acoustic phonetic analysis of the recorded speech revealed significant changes as a result of real-time feedback transformation. Overall, subjects' speech was slower while their feedback was perturbed, and they produced more pauses (MANOVA, p < 0.01). Fricatives and stops experienced global, general changes, both in duration (p < 0.01) and in the frequency of frication in sibilants (p < 0.001). Vowel quality, by contrast, was affected locally: speakers consistently altered vowel F1 (height) in particular areas of the vowel space, e.g. lowering high vowels [i, u] or raising the low vowels [æ, ɑ], while F2 remained unchanged (significant Condition*Vowel interaction in F1, p < 0.01). In addition, when subjects were exposed to the feedback transformation, they appeared to focus more heavily on the articulation of consonants as opposed to vowels; the ratio of consonant to vowel articulation duration (for stops, fricatives, and affricates) increased significantly across speaking conditions (p < 0.01). When faced with uncertain acoustic feedback, it appears that speakers begin to rely more on the unperturbed somatosensory feedback from consonants. Overall, subjects' speech was significantly impacted by the introduction of a novel change to their acoustic feedback. The challenges introduced by the feedback alteration appear to increase subjects' cognitive load, resulting in slower speech with more pauses, and the reduced spectral resolution of the transformed feedback results in substantial changes in segmental acoustic phonetics as well. Investigating these relationships between speech perception and production continues to shed light on the interconnectedness of the two processes, and will hopefully lead to better understanding of how spoken language is produced and monitored in normal conditions. http://www.indiana.edu/~iulc/images/2012ConferenceAbstracts/6%20beth%20casserly.pdf
Evolving minds: Using ALE [Activation Likelihood Estimate] to investigate the presence of a common neural substrate for syntax and stone tool making
Time: Sunday, April 15, 2012 05:00pm - 06:30pm
Place: Informatics East
Katharine BabcockEarly stone tool technology (~2.5 - 0.5 mya) and modern language both exhibit sequential and hierarchical structure. This has led many to hypothesize that these two distinctly human attributes may utilize a common neural substrate. This pilot study explores this possible homology by conducting a meta-analysis of functional imaging data on both stone tool making and syntactical processing tasks. Studies were selected from online databases using the following criteria: 1. they comprised whole brain scans 2. were not region of interest studies 3. involved a comparison of either task of interest alongside a baseline control task, and 4. reported the stereotactic (x, y, z) coordinates of each brain activation. In total, eight different experimental conditions were collected to represent syntax. Two experimental conditions were obtained for stone tool making. A relatively new meta-analysis technique known as activation likelihood estimate (ALE) was employed to quantify the clusters of neural activations based on their stereotactic coordinates across and between both types of data sets. Shared activation between stone tool making and syntactical processing was observed in six activation clusters, including Brodmann areas 46, 44/45, and 40. This pilot study supports for the hypothesis that stone tool making and syntax share a common neural substrate. Shifts in the complexity of tool technology, such as that occurring ~1.7 mya between Oldowan and Acheulean technologies, may index important changes in human linguistic capacities.Part of the poster session of the Midwest Undergraduate Cognitive Science Conference
Space and early word learning
Kelly DakarianResearch has shown that spatial information has been linked with multimodal object memories and that the spatial information can be used as an index to access those memories. . In that study, the infants were presented with novel objects using a pop up box and named in either spatially consistent locations or spatially inconsistent locations. The infants were later tested to see if they had learned the novel object's names. The results showed that 16-18 month olds are better able to learn novel words for objects if the objects are presented in the same constant location opposed to varied locations. The current experiment investigates this phenomenon in realistic and real life situations with natural social cues such as pointing and looking while naming an object. This study was done as a follow up to the pop up study in order to see if constant location of novel objects actually improves learning in a more life-like situation. Infants age 16-18 months old were presented a novel object on a tray divided into three different locations. Each presentation consisted of labeling the object by saying, "Look! That's a Dax! See! It's a Dax! Can you get the Dax!" while pointing and looking at the object each time it was named. Afterwards, the tray was pushed forward and the infant was instructed to grab the object at that specific location. One group of infants was presented with objects at consistent locations (object 1 always appeared at location 1), while a second group of infants were presented with objects at varied locations (object 1 appeared at locations 1, 2, and 3). All infants were then tested for learning. The training phase consisted of 18 presentations. In the testing phase the infants were presented with either 3 familiar objects or the 3 novel objects in a novel location and were asked for a specific ("Where's the Dax? Get the Dax!"). There was a filler familiar testing trial in between each novel testing trial to ensure that the children were continually reminded to pick the item that the experimenter labeled. Each novel object was asked for twice in order to see if the infants had learned the novel words. The results will help to further understand how location and spatial indexing help infants learn in a naturalistic, multimodal environment.Part of the poster session of the Midwest Undergraduate Cognitive Science Conference
Acoustic characteristics of the English vowels of speakers of East Asian languages
Emily GarlPrevious studies have shown that a talker's first language (L1) has a strong effect on the production of a second language (L2). Differences in the vowel inventories of the L1 and L2 influence the production of an L2, which leads to variation that may be perceived as a 'foreign accent'. In order to better understand the effect of the L1 on L2 vowels, and how this interacts with the perception of foreign accent, the current study investigated the English vowels of twelve native speakers of Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean. These languages contain markedly different vowel inventories than American English, as well as one another, but talkers of these languages are commonly perceived as having a similar, or even the same, accent by native American English listeners. Acoustic measurements, including vowel duration and first (F1) and second (F2) formant frequency, were collected from hVd words featuring 11 English monopthong vowels produced by the four L2 groups and an American English group. Results revealed that the non-native talkers' English vowels deviated from the native talkers' vowels with respect to both F1 and F2 and duration. Additionally, each L2 group differed in their realizations of the English vowels, which reflected the vowel systems of their unique L1s. Although there was a high degree of individual variability, these results support previous research suggesting that L2 sounds not found in the L1 will be the most difficult to acquire. Results of the acoustic analysis and theoretical motivations for the study will be discussed.Part of the poster session of the Midwest Undergraduate Cognitive Science Conference
Scripts, Smudges, and Static: Materializing a Minority Language of Siberia
Time: Monday, April 16, 2012 04:00pm - 05:00pm
Place: Redbud Room, IMU
Kathryn GraberMass media make fleeting, inchoate language into the tangible "stuff" of daily life, fixing speech into writing, newsprint, airwaves, and binary code. What is enabled and obscured in these semiotic transitions, and how might it matter for minority language revitalization? In this talk, Kathryn Graber will discuss her current research on language, media, and materiality in contemporary Buryatia, an ethnic republic of the Russian Federation.
Anytime n-best extraction for HMMs (and higher-order HMMs, if time)
Time: Tuesday, April 17, 2012 11:00am - 12:00pm
It is easy to find the first-best HMM state sequence given an observation. However, finding the n-best sequences is harder. Moreover, we'd like to get the n-best sequences without specifying n beforehand (that is, we'd like an "anytime" algorithm), so that we can just keep taking as many sequences as we need. Nilsson & Goldberger (2001) presented an algorithm for anytime n-best extraction on first-order HMMs. I've simplified their algorithm considerably by applying insights about recursion which are made obvious when implementing their algorithm in a functional language. In addition, effective HMMs for NLP require more than bigram language models, so I have generalized their algorithm to work for higher-order HMMs.In this talk I will present the simplified algorithm from a high-level perspective, and if there is time (and interest) then I can also present the proofs for why the algorithm actually works.
Comparing interaction and use of space in innovative and traditional Spanish classrooms
Time: Wednesday, April 18, 2012 01:30pm - 02:15pm
Department of Spanish & Portuguese Hispanic Linguistics Brown Bag SeriesComparing interaction and use of space in innovative and traditional Spanish classroomsLaura Gurzynski-Weiss, Avizia Y. Long, & Megan Solon
Pragmatics Festival
Time: Thursday, April 19, 2012 10:00am - 12:30pm
Place: Indiana Memorial Union (IMU)
Oak Room: Colloquium #1 - "Pragmatic Development in Study Abroad Contexts"Walnut Room: Oral presentationshttp://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Time: Thursday, April 19, 2012 02:00pm - 03:00pm
Oak Room and Walnut Room: Oral presentationshttp://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Meaning as a hidden variable in the use of conventional expressions in L2 pragmatics
Time: Thursday, April 19, 2012 03:00pm - 03:30pm
Place: Oak Room, Indiana Memorial Union
Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig (Indiana University)http://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Time: Thursday, April 19, 2012 03:45pm - 04:45pm
Variation in Cross-Cultural and Intercultural Pragmatics: The Case of Service Encounters
Time: Thursday, April 19, 2012 05:00pm - 06:15pm
Place: Oak Room, Indiana Memorial Union (IMU)
César Félix-Brasdefer (Indiana University)Plenary #1http://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Time: Friday, April 20, 2012 08:30am - 10:30am
Oak, Maple, and Walnut Rooms: Oral presentationshttp://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Time: Friday, April 20, 2012 10:45am - 11:45am
Oak and Maple Rooms: Oral presentationsWalnut Room: Pedagogy Workshop for Less Commonly Taught Languages (Alwiya Omar, Indiana University)http://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Time: Friday, April 20, 2012 11:45am - 12:45pm
Time: Friday, April 20, 2012 02:00pm - 03:30pm
Oak Room: Pragmatics research and the language classroomMaple and Walnut Rooms: Oral presentationshttp://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Time: Friday, April 20, 2012 03:45pm - 04:45pm
Oak Room: Colloquium 2 – "Pragmatics research and the language classroom"Maple and Walnut Rooms: Oral presentationshttp://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Why Are They So Weird?: Pragmatics and Miscommunication Across Cultures
Time: Friday, April 20, 2012 05:00pm - 06:15pm
Diana Boxer (University of Florida)Plenary #2http://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Time: Saturday, April 21, 2012 09:00am - 10:30am
Oak and Walnut Rooms: Oral presentationshttp://www.indiana.edu/~pragfest/home.php
Language of Healthcare (Pragmatics Festival Colloquium #3)
Time: Saturday, April 21, 2012 11:00am - 01:30pm
Place: Maple Room, Indiana Memorial Union (IMU)
Second language fluency and cognition: The study of Spanish second language development in an overseas immersion program and an at-home foreign language classroom
Time: Monday, April 23, 2012 09:35am - 10:35am
Place: Ballantine Hall 004
Lorenzo Garcia-AmayaThis dissertation investigates the development of oral fluency and L2-specific measures of cognitive abilities for two groups of L2 learners of Spanish (L1 English) in two different learning contexts: a 7-week overseas intensive immersion program (IM) in León, Spain and a 15-week domestic foreign language classroom in an at-home (AH) context at a large Midwestern institution in the United States. In total, 56 native speakers of English participated in the study – 27 in the IM program and 29 in the AH program. All learners performed a video-retell oral production task in addition to a detailed language contact profile and a proficiency test, and IM learners performed three cognitive tasks designed to elicit L2-specific measures of lexical access, lexical retrieval, and attention control. Data collection was longitudinal for both learner groups. Overall, the findings show significantly greater fluency gains for IM learners over AH learners, which can be attributed to the significantly greater amount of exposure of IM learners to the L2, as indicated in the language contact profile. In terms of cognitive tasks, IM learners show significantly faster Spanish lexical access over time, but significantly slower English lexical access over time. However, no significant longitudinal differences were seen for IM learners regarding lexical retrieval in Spanish (which requires articulation and morphophonological and phonetic encoding in addition to lexical access). The results have implications for models of speech production and processing and their applications to L2 acquisition; they also prove the methodological importance of collecting data in situ instead of after learners' return to their country of origin. Finally, this dissertation is designed to account for the role of context of learning in second language acquisition.
On the Compatibility between SLA Corpus and Variationist Research
Time: Monday, April 23, 2012 02:30pm - 03:30pm
Place: IMU State Room East
Joseph CollentineOn the Compatibility between SLA Corpus and Variationist Research
Analyzing YouTube comments
Time: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 11:00am - 12:00pm
Shahab Khan, Markus Dickinson, and Sandra KueblerWe have started working on automatically performing a linguistic analysis of comments on YouTube, with the aim of eventually classifying videos. We will report some early work on normalizing the text and attempts at parse revision.
L643 (Advanced Syntax) student presentations, Day 1
Time: Tuesday, April 24, 2012 11:15am - 12:05pm
Place: Ballantine Hall 147
Everyone is invited. If possible, please notify Dr. Yoshihisa Kitagawa beforehand so that your handout can be prepared.11:15-11:40Dative Alternation in Mandarin and Part-of-speech Assignment for geiYunwen Su11:40-12:05Analysis of Adjective Word Order in SpanishJoe Ducey
Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition Final Project Colloquium
Time: Wednesday, April 25, 2012 04:00pm - 07:15pm
Place: Sycamore 200
4:00 - 4:20 pmInvestigating instructor stated beliefs about pronunciation instructionLisa Baldwin & Avizia Y. Long4:25-4:45 pmIndividual differences and subject pronoun variation in L2 Spanish Bret Linford4:50-5:10 pmInstructors' linguistic knowledge when teaching Spanish as a foreign language Rosa M. Piqueres Gilabert & Rocío Martínez Galiano5:15-5:35 pmAnalysis of L2 Spanish learners' self-reported anxiety, willingness to communicate, and motivationPatrick Moore5:40-6:00 pmComparing physiological and questionnaire data of anxiety in the foreign language classroom Sophia Rammell6:00 - 6:20 pmMotivation in heritage learners of Spanish Beth Herring6:25-6:45 pmThe study abroad experience and learner motivation Melissa Whatley6:50-7:10 pmThe interaction between explicit L2 phonological instruction and learning style and their effects on the improvement of L2 speech perceptionRob Bedinghaus
Studies in the History of the English Language / Germanic Linguistics Annual Conference
Time: Thursday, April 26, 2012 09:00am - 10:30am
Place: Oak, Maple, and Walnut Rooms (Indiana Memorial Union)
Time: Thursday, April 26, 2012 11:00am - 12:30pm
L643 (Advanced Syntax) student presentations, Day 2 (Serbo-Croatian Day)
Time: Thursday, April 26, 2012 11:15am - 12:30pm
Everyone is invited. If possible, please notify Dr. Yoshihisa Kitagawa beforehand so that your handout can be prepared.11:15-11:40Sentential Negation in Serbo-Croatian and CzechMuamera Begovic11:40-12:05Agreement Patterns in Italian and MacedonianMelissa Witcombe12:05-12:30Control in Serbian Subjunctive ComplementsMarija Jankovic
A Grammar of Hidatsa
Time: Thursday, April 26, 2012 12:00pm - 01:00pm
Place: Distinguished Alumni Room, IMU
Dissertation defense of Indrek ParkThis dissertation describes the grammar of Hidatsa, a Siouan language spoken by about 100 people living on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. The dissertation follows a traditional descriptive form used in documenting undescribed languages, proceeding from phonology to morphology to sentence structure. The grammar is presented within the framework of Dixon's (1997) Basic Linguistic Theory.In most respects, Hidatsa is a typical Siouan language. The Siouan characteristics include a limited phoneme inventory, split-intransitivity and the encoding of participant information on the verb, extensive deverbal nominalization and compounding, an elaborate set of modal and aspectual suffixes and clitics, two types of possession (alienable and inalienable), motion and posture verbs, etc.However, Hidatsa has also developed various idiosyncratic properties, the unique combination of which sets it apart from other related languages. The most important hitherto undescribed traits include, but are not limited to, the pitch-accent system and ergative case marking on independent noun phrases. There is also an elaborate set of utterance-final obligatory modal particles that has been cited widely yet analyzed erroneously in theoretical linguistic works.All the linguistic data on which the dissertation is based were collected directly from the speakers of Hidatsa on Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. The grammar includes descriptions of all attested derivational and inflectional morphemes and is illustrated with numerous examples and paradigms.The grammar of Hidatsa sheds light on an inadequately described member of the Siouan language family. It resolves various misconceptions about the structure of Hidatsa that have affected the development of linguistic theory and offers new insights into the typology of languages.---All faculty and graduate students are encouraged to attend. As a courtesy, if you are planning on attending, please send an e-mail to the chair of the dissertation committee, Robert Botne to let him know you plan to be there.A reception will be held immediately following in Ballantine Hall 004.
Time: Thursday, April 26, 2012 02:00pm - 03:30pm
Time: Thursday, April 26, 2012 04:00pm - 05:30pm
Lexical Diffusion and Grammar
Time: Thursday, April 26, 2012 05:30pm - 06:30pm
Place: Frangipani Room (Indiana Memorial Union)
Marc van OostendorpPlenary lecture for Studies in the History of the English Language / Germanic Linguistics Annual Conferencehttp://www.indiana.edu/~glacshel/featured_speakers.php
Time: Friday, April 27, 2012 09:00am - 10:30am
Time: Friday, April 27, 2012 11:00am - 12:30pm
Second language learners' perception of word-final vowels
Time: Friday, April 27, 2012 01:30pm - 03:00pm
Place: PSY 128 (conference room)
Sophia RammellFor learners of Spanish, word-final vowel perception is important to indicate subject and mood of the verb. Specifically, the word-final vowel marks the subjunctive mood, a mood distinction which differs from learners' native language of English. Learners' perception of the subjunctive in written input as well as their oral production have been widely studied in second language literature, but perception studies using spoken input from native speakers are lacking. The proposed study will measure accuracy in perception of word-final vowels using three tasks of varying difficulty: a paragraph completion task, a sentence completion task, and a syllable completion task. Learners will hear the stimuli in both noise and quiet conditions. The study will investigate whether the task's cognitive load affects perception in word-final vowels and if learners differ in accuracy by mood, final vowel, or noise condition. The proposed investigation will fill in gaps in second language acquisition literature about the perception of the subjunctive mood by learners, and it will also incorporate effects of background noise in order to show real-world applications to perception of word-final vowels.
Time: Friday, April 27, 2012 02:00pm - 03:30pm
Time: Friday, April 27, 2012 04:00pm - 05:30pm
Time: Friday, April 27, 2012 05:30pm - 06:30pm
Donka MinkovaPlenary lecture for Studies in the History of the English Language / Germanic Linguistics Annual Conferencehttp://www.indiana.edu/~glacshel/ featured_speakers.php
Time: Saturday, April 28, 2012 09:00am - 10:30am
Time: Saturday, April 28, 2012 11:00am - 12:30pm
Time: Saturday, April 28, 2012 02:00pm - 03:30pm
Complex Systems and the History of the English Language
Time: Saturday, April 28, 2012 04:00pm - 05:00pm
Bill Kretzschmar Plenary lecture for Studies in the History of the English Language / Germanic Linguistics Annual Conferencehttp://www.indiana.edu/~glacshel/ featured_speakers.php
How knowledge of linguistic structure and knowledge of the lexicon interact during language development and use
Time: Monday, April 30, 2012 04:00pm - 05:00pm
Place: PY 128
A child's language development has enormous consequences. We know that most of children's knowledge about language will not, and cannot, be acquired through explicit instruction. This has raised interest in implicit and statistical learning theories of language acquisition. One important criticism of statistical learning theories is that they are underspecified. What are the units over which they operate, both in terms of modality (linguistic vs. world knowledge) and grain size (features vs. objects, or phonemes vs. morphemes vs. words vs. phrases)?In my talk, I will be discussing these issues in relation to some of my work, most of which has dealt with the relationship between a person's knowledge of the lexicon (or word meaning) and their knowledge of other aspects of linguistic knowledge, such as linguistic structure or syntax. Using a combination of corpus analyses, behavioral experiments with infants, children, and adults, and computational models, I will argue that knowledge of the lexicon and knowledge of linguistic structure form a bidirectional and coupled system, whereby learning about one can help bootstrap the learning of the other. Formalizing this system is an important step for statistical theories of learning and allowing it to make useful (and falsifiable) predictions about the nature of language acquisition.
SaafiFest: Papers from the Linguistics Field Methods class
Time: Tuesday, May 01, 2012 09:30am - 12:15pm
Place: Ballantine Hall 144
9:00 AM Historical and modern perspectives on influences on the Saafi language Todd Smith 9:30 AM Inflectionally reduced verbs in Saafi Keelan Armstrong10:00 AM The accentual system of SaafiJonathan Washington10:30 AM Break 10:45 AM On the relationship between voiced plosives and implosives: A case study of a Cangin language David Bolter 11:15 AM Word-final consonant neutralization in SaafiJuliet Stanton 11:45 PMFeature- and position-sensitive elision in Saafi: Vowel hiatus in the composite groupMichael Dow
Computation, semantics and discourse function in the acquisition of L2 English past progressive
Time: Wednesday, May 02, 2012 02:45pm - 03:45pm
Dissertation proposal of Hyun-Jin KimAll faculty and graduate students are encouraged to attend.
Teaching and Learning L2 Pronunciation: A Closer Look at Classroom and Extra-Classroom Factors in the Development of Intelligibility in ESL Learners
Time: Wednesday, May 02, 2012 05:00pm - 06:00pm
Place: Ballantine Hall 209
Dissertation proposal of Joshua GordonAll faculty and graduate students are encouraged to attend.
Influence of the first and second language in the processing of tones
Time: Friday, May 04, 2012 02:45pm - 04:45pm
Place: BH 208
Vance SchaeferPublic dissertation proposal defenseSecond language (L2) phonology literature suggests that when a phonetic or linguistic dimension is present or important (i.e., prominence) in the first language (L1), acquiring words that use this dimension in an L2 will be facilitated (Feature Hypothesis, McAllister, Flege, & Piske, 2002). Within this theoretical framework, the pilot study for this dissertation proposal examined the influence of the L1 phonological system on the naïve perception of non-native tones. L1 speakers of languages varying in the prominence of lexically-contrastive pitch (i.e., tone, pitch accent, word stress) established a hierarchy of performance on an AXB perception task of Thai tones, featuring three level and two contour tones. Results show that the perception of non-native tone appears to be shaped by this varying prominence of lexically-contrastive pitch in the L1. Performance on three separate conditions comparing various combinations of tone type (e.g., level, contour, mixed) also differed by L1 group.The proposed dissertation will replicate the AXB perception task and add a group of L2 Mandarin/L1 English speakers in order to examine the extent of L2 influence on the perception of non-native Thai tones. The dissertation will also extend into L2 lexical encoding by implementing a lexical decision task for this same group of L2 Mandarin/L1 English speakers.
An Assessment of Language Attitudes towards African American Vernacular English
Time: Monday, May 07, 2012 10:00am - 11:00am
Place: Distinguished Alumni Room, Indiana Memorial Union
Speakers of stigmatized varieties are often judged as less educated and less competent than speakers of prestigious varieties. This can have profound effects on speakers' academic achievement and language assessment in schools. Linguists' efforts to destigmatize AAVE have included providing commentary in media outlets, publishing scholarly works, and developing reference materials about AAVE. On a localized level, a dialect awareness course may be suitable in addressing the misrepresentation of AAVE by demonstrating that nonstandard varieties are not ungrammatical or merely slang. However, there is lack of research regarding the effectiveness of such techniques. It remains unclear whether dialect awareness courses are effective in changing attitudes towards a nonstandard variety. The current study is set up to determine attitudes of students towards AAVE by investigating the effect of a dialect awareness course on language attitudes of undergraduate students attending a large Midwestern university. During the 15-week course, the 120 students enrolled learned about the background and structure of AAVE. Topics included discussing what AAVE is, social and ideological factors affecting its representation in the media and within the African American community, distinguishing AAVE from slang, grammatical features and possible origins of AAVE, and educational approaches to teaching children whose home speech is AAVE. In the 2009-10 academic year, a questionnaire was administered to students enrolled in the dialect awareness course, and to students in a general linguistics course and a biology course. The results show that the dialect awareness course is most effective at changing student attitudes towards AAVE as a linguistic variety. Upon completion of the dialect awareness course, students perceive AAVE as a distinct dialect of English rather than as slang or incorrect English. However, the dialect awareness course had minimal effect on students' perceptions of AAVE-speakers and acceptability of AAVE use.---A reception will be held immediately following in Ballantine Hall Room 004 All faculty and graduate students are encouraged to attend. As a courtesy, if you are planning on attending, please send an e-mail to the chair of the dissertation committee, Clancy Clements, to let him know you plan to be there.
Computational Approaches to Slavic Languages
Time: Thursday, May 10, 2012 08:00am - 05:00pm
Place: TBA
Special session on Slavic Computational Linguistics: Computational Approaches to Slavic LanguagesCall for Papers:Abstracts are invited for 30-minute presentations (plus 10 minutes for discussion) on topics dealing with digital language resources, corpora, language technologies and computational linguistics for Slavic languages. With their morphological richness and varying freeness of word order, the Slavic languages present unique challenges for computational processing, and we seek submissions investigating these issues. In particular, we welcome work on (annotated) language corpora and language technology for any Slavic language (POS tagging, parsing, WSD, NLP applications, etc.). Abstracts are limited to two pages and should be anonymous. Presenters will be able to submit final papers to a special volume of the Journal of Slavic Linguistics (JSL). See the following URL for more details:http://linguistlist.org/confcustom/customhome.cfm?Emeetingid=1402J84058B65648408040441
"Ellipsis" session of FASL21
Time: Thursday, May 10, 2012 09:30am - 10:50am
"Morphosyntax" session of FASL21
Time: Thursday, May 10, 2012 11:00am - 12:20pm
"Syntax I" session of FASL21
Time: Thursday, May 10, 2012 01:50pm - 03:50pm
"Computational Linguistics" session of FASL21
Time: Thursday, May 10, 2012 04:00pm - 05:20pm
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text:
San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro is now in the history books as the first Latino keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention. He spoke just before First Lady Michelle Obama.
On Wednesday morning, his speech made front page of the local newspaper and was a water cooler topic of the day for many. .
San Antonio resident Mario Obledo Jr. said, "I thought it was fantastic. I think the mayor showed a lot of conviction and passion and certainly put San Antonio on the map.
"I thought he was awesome," said Diedrie Brewton. "I thought he was awesome, did an outstanding job (and) represented San Antonio well."
During his speech, Castro talked about his upbringing on the city's West side, the need for educational opportunities, and gave thanks to his family for their support.
"He had a good mix of history along with what his ideas are for the future," said Fred Plank. "Having said that, I'm a registered Republican."
On the KSAT 12 Facebook page, there were more than 600 responses to the speech on Wednesday morning..
Most were positive, but not all.
Lisa Lopez wrote: "Not happy that he represented my hometown of San Antonio since forever. SMH. Change is in the air. Romney & Ryan all the way."
Tyler Coleman wrote: "Blah, blah, blah. For a party who wants everyone to be seen as equals, race sure was mentioned one too many times!"
Although reactions are mixed, some people speculate Castro's speech could one day lead to a higher office.
"I could see him being part of the Obama Cabinet (or) Senate," said Hubert Watson.
"Hopefully, one of these days he'll be the President," said Daniel Gallardo.

subset: commoncrawl


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rechargeable anodized aluminum LED work light TLWL53A from CPS Products
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text:
15-year old Anthony Arroyo of Clovis is focused as he prepares to plead his case to Congress.
"I'm a lot better than I used to be. I don't feel sick anymore. I feel great," said Anthony Arroyo, a bone marrow transplant recipient.
When Anthony was three years old, he was diagnosed with a rare form of anemia which attacked his immune system.
So the community rallied to help find a matching bone marrow donor to give Anthony the transplant he desperately needed. The search ended when he was six and doctors in Los Angeles performed his life-saving surgery.
The Buchanan High School student now looks to make history. On Thursday, Anthony, his mother Juanita and a dozen other blood cancer survivors from around the country will converge on Capitol Hill.
"The reason why I'm flying all the way over there instead of writing a letter is so they can see how serious we are, how dedicated we are and that we really want to keep doing this," said Arroyo.
They'll urge lawmakers not to cut funding to the National Marrow Donor Program. Its non-profit group, Be The Match, raises money for marrow and cord blood transplants. It stands to lose $3 million due to federal budget cuts.
Anthony has his speech ready.
"Imagine if you had a life-threatening disease and need a bone marrow transplant or a blood transfusion. How would you feel about that?" Arroyo questioned.
"For him to be an advocate for this and to come out and say I want to do this makes me a proud parent," said Juanita Arroyo, Anthony's mother.
The loss of federal financial support could be devastating.
"This means that as many as 20,000 willing volunteers and 1,000 cord blood units may not be added to the national registry," said Liz Ustick of Be The Match.
Anthony can't stomach the thought, so he is prepared to fight.
"It's saving lives, the lives of everyday people," said Arroyo.
Anthony continues to have anemia. He takes medicine each day to keep it under control. However his doctors are hopeful that one day he will be able to stop taking those pills.
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text:
UTSpeaks: Your certain death
How can we maintain control of our end-of-life experiences?
That death comes to us all is certain. But what are not certain are the circumstances of our deaths and the experiences we and our loved ones must share at the end.
How can we prepare for death? How should we plan for long, painful or debilitating terminal illness? Is it essential that we communicate our most profound wishes on how we choose to die to our family and carers?
This public lecture asks us to confront some of the most significant questions we must consider as individuals, carers and health professionals. With expert UTS speakers from nursing and medicine, it deals with the myths and realities of dying and touches on the euthanasia debate. It explores how we can maintain power and choice at the end of life and will conclude with a moderated interactive forum.
Professor Patricia Davidson
Patricia Davidson is Director of the Centre for Cardiovascular and Chronic Care at UTS. Her research addresses the vulnerabilities that patients and extended family experience in coping with and adjusting to chronic health problems. She is actively involved in policy and health service development to meet the needs of the increasing number of Australians living with a chronic illness. In particular, she advocates for integrating a palliative approach in care models to improve advance-care planning and symptom management.
Professor David Currow
David Currow is Professor of Palliative and Supportive Services at Flinders University, the Chief Cancer Officer and CEO of the Cancer Institute NSW and Adjunct Professor with the UTS Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery and Health. Previously he was foundation Chief Executive Officer of Cancer Australia, the Australian Government's national cancer control agency. He is widely published, is senior associate editor of Journal of Palliative Medicine and on the advisory board of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management. David is a former president of Palliative Care Australia and a former president of the Clinical Oncological
Society of Australia.
Use hashtag #utspeaks to tweet about the lecture.
- Date:
- 13 June 2012
- Time:
- 18:30 - 20:15
Drinks from 6pm.
- Location:
- City - Broadway University Hall 745 Harris St, Ultimo (map
- Audience:
- All Welcome
- Cost:
- This is a free event.
- by Tuesday 12 June 2012 to email@example.com
- Contact:
- email@example.com
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text:
Let your creativity loose with this colorful, ten-piece Hanukkah lamp. Arrange the pieces in a circle or a line, or form whatever shapes your desire each night. The graded well holds either Hanukkah candles or standard Shabbat candles. During the year, restack your pieces to form candlesticks for use on Shabbat. Pieces come packaged in a velvet pouch for travel or storage. Made in Israel.
Anodized aluminum 1-1/4" diameter with 1"h discs


text:
Computer labs for teaching
IT Services manages and provides up-to-date computer facilities (hardware and software) to support teaching and learning activities.
Standard Computer Teaching Laboratories and Student Computing areas are located at :
- Callaghan campus
- Ourimbah campus
- Newcastle City locations including City Precinct and DMB
- Sydney
IT Services' staff also support a number of specialist (non-standard) computer teaching laboratories for use by specific Faculties.
Software in the teaching labs
Software loaded onto Computer Teaching Laboratory computers is updated prior to the start of each teaching period (semester). Requests for additional software outside these update periods will be placed in a queue and attended to as time and resources permit.
Installed software will be available for testing by academics 2 weeks prior to the start of each Semester
Computer Teaching Laboratories may be available for examinations, subject to negotiation with Examinations and Graduations, and IT Services
Academic staff using the computer teaching laboratories have a number of responsibilities and must:
- Notify IT Services by 1st December (for semester 1) and 1st July (for semester 2) of any software or hardware requirements for computer teaching laboratories
- Provide licenced copies of software for use in computer teaching laboratories (if software is not covered by a University site licence)
- Test their software packages installed for use in Computer Teaching Laboratories
- Report broken equipment to the 17triplezero IT Service Desk
IT Services does not :
- Make bookings for the Computer Teaching Laboratories - lecturers should contact their Faculty Timetabling Officer to ensure bookings are made to meet their requirements
- Make bookings for the use of the Computer Teaching Laboratories in support of exams – lecturers need to contact Examinations and Graduations to discuss their requirements
- Support Audio visual equipment within the Computer Teaching Laboratories which is installed, maintained and managed by the Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) – Teaching Space Support Team
- Supply or support photocopiers in Computer Teaching Laboratories
- Manage or maintain Computer Teaching Laboratories and general access student computers at partner locations such as Port Macquarie or Singapore campus– staff and students should check with their local IT support team.
Contact the 17triplezero IT Service Desk
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