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...

Location - Dodd 146 Temporal constitution in language and mind Semanticists posit at least two categories of dynamic entity—event and process—in their explanations of the semantic properties of different classes of verbs and verb phrases. I consider the event-process distinction as a case study in the interface between linguistic and extralinguistic cognition. In a series...

Location - Royce Hall 362 Title: Prosodic structure, timing, and fortition-lenition patterns Abstract: This talk reviews cross-linguistic evidence that certain common lenition processes such as spirantization, intervocalic voicing, and flapping take place in a component of grammar that governs the fine-grained temporal dynamics of speech sounds and their interaction with prosodic structure. I argue that...

Location - Math and Science 5200 Title: Morpheme Ordering Happens in the Phonology Abstract: The determination of the order of morphemes within words has traditionally been modeled using cyclic concatenation, the one-by-one attachment of affixal morphemes to the root, guided by morphosyntactic constituency via the “Mirror Principle” (Baker 1985). In this talk, I propose an alternative,...

Languages vary in their phonotactics: how sounds are allowed to be sequenced into words. For example, although English, Spanish, and Farsi all have the sounds /p l s/, English allows the complex onsets /sp/ and /pl/, as in ‘speech’ and ‘play’, Spanish only /pl/, as in ‘playa’, while Farsi allows no complex onsets at all....

Location - Royce Hall 362 The department tour slot is still open. You can sign up here (same link). When the phonological mind meets another modality: Two-handed articulation in Shanghai Sign Language Abstract: To what extent are the phonological systems of languages, spoken or signed, structured similarly if we assume that they both draw on...