Theories of language acquisition have typically been developed using an idealization of the phonetic learning problem.  For example, phonetic category learning models have used input that is much less variable than the speech children hear and have assumed that learners already know which dimensions of the speech signal to pay attention to.  In this talk,...

Location: Haines Hall 220

Location: Haines Hall 220

Location: Haines Hall 220 On the Symmetry Between Merge and Adjoin A crucial task for syntactic theory is to determine what syntactic operations are made available by the human capacity for language, what their properties are, and why they have the properties they do. This talk aims to bring us closer to that goal by...

Location: Haines Hall 220 When phonological learning is not statistical: how learning biases have reshaped Malagasy paradigms One view of phonological learning is that it is driven by a domain-general bias towards frequency-matching, and therefore predictable from statistical distributions of the language (Albright 2002; Ernestus & Baayen 2003; Nosofsky 2011). A competing view is that...

Location: Haines Hall 220 What is “adapted” in adaptive speech perception? The acoustic-phonetic realization of the same linguistic categories (e.g., phonemes, syllables, or words) can vary considerably both within and across talkers. This variability poses a challenge for listeners, who must be able to perceive speech accurately despite these changes. Empirical data suggest that listeners adapt to cross-talker...

Representing individuals In this talk I will consider what is known about how the human mind and brain represents individuals non-linguistically, and what the implications are for our theories of linguistic interpretation. In standard model-theoretic semantics, individuals are simply taken for granted as part of the world model; and I too will assume that the...

  Location - Dodd 146 Language users' expectations shape phonetic flexibility Language users show considerable flexibility in their phonetic perception and production. Phonetic flexibility phenomena such as convergence and perceptual learning are of broad interest because of their connections to questions in language learning, sociolinguistic variation, and diachronic change. In this talk I will present...

Location - Dodd 146 New perspectives on speech variability from large-scale studies I present two studies which aim to understand the structure and sources of variability in speech production, enabled by novel quantitative methods. I also discuss several open-source tools for automatic analysis of speech which enable such large-scale studies by speeding up or replacing...