does language shape thought?
You get to decide here.
non-recoverable deletion
A post on mindhacks reports on a 1974 study on writer’s block, replicated in 2007. The study has a lot of parallels with Fiengo & Lasnik’s 1972 squib in Linguistic Inquiry on unrecoverable deletion in syntax. I wonder in how many fields similar studies were published, and when it started.
scientific literacy
There have been two interesting blog posts on scientific literacy recently on the bps digest. The first addresses how to present findings in ways that minimizes a ‘scientific impotence response,’ where people discard scientific findings because they are incompatible with their world view by resorting to claiming that a certain topic cannot be properly studied scientifically. The second post discusses how one can try to present findings effectively in order to debunk pseudo-scientific beliefs.
deadline extended: international seminar on speech production
The next International Seminar on Speech Production will take place next summer in Montreal. Here’s the call for papers:
We are pleased to announce that the the ninth International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP’11) will be held in Montreal, Canada from June 20th to 23rd, 2011. ISSP’11 is the continuation of a series of seminars dating back to Grenoble (1988), Leeds (1990), Old Saybrook (1993), Autrans (1996), Kloster Seeon (2000), Sydney (2003), Ubatuba (2006), and Strasbourg (2008). Several aspects of speech production will be covered, such as phonology, phonetics, linguistics, mechanics, acoustics, physiology, motor control, neurosciences and computer science.
For this edition, a special session will be organized in honor of Dr. Joseph Perkell, for his contribution to the field.
THE DEADLINE FOR ABSTRACT SUBMISSION IS December 15th, 2010. Technical details will be posted soon on the conference website (www.issp2011.uqam.ca).
prosody and dr. syntax, 1832
There is an interesting series of articles in the new york times on the benefits and dangers of using large-scale corpora and statistical methods in the analysis of literary and other texts in the humanities. The first discusses some projects that are part of the digging-into-data challenge. The second article illustrates what race horses with conspicuous names can teach us about the pitfalls of the new windfall of data (hat-tip to Kate McCurdy).
the king's speech
A movie about King George VI is soon to be released in North America (December 10 in Canada), which centers around his stammer, and his successful way of dealing with it in a job that turned out to require lot of public speaking. He worked with speech pathologist Lionel Logue to overcome the problem. You can listen to a recording of a famous Christmas address of his given in 1939 here (it takes a little while before the recording starts playing).
More …cab drivers and non-native phonological contrasts
It’s hard not to think of the acquisition of non-native phonological contrasts when reading about the research on London cab-drivers described here (well, if you’re a linguist, that is). I found the blog post via a discussion of the study here.
Essentially, London cab-drivers are better at learning new routes than a control group when the new route is located in an unfamiliar city, but they have a harder time learning a new route than a control group when it is located in London, and thus competes with their previous knowledege. This latter effect seems similar to the observation that it’s harder to learn a new phonological contrast after having already learned a language, compared to when acquiring a first language.
Various people have indeed argued that our ability to learn new types of phonological contrasts might deteriorate not (just) because we are past a critical period of brain development, but (also) because after having learned our first language(s), it’s become harder to fit new contrasts into our existing ‘map.’ By having learned a language we might have developed “an inability to inhibit access to existing (and now competing) memory representations,” to quote from the blog post on cab drivers. This idea is advocated here:
Perhaps one could test whether there is really a parallel between the results found for cab-drivers and language learners by comparing how well we can learn a particular new contrast when it’s presented as part of a very different language as opposed to as part of a different dialect of our native language. The latter should actually be more difficult, if the parallel would hold up, although one would somehow have to control for the familiarity with the lexical material. And I guess there should be less of an issue in learning a new gestural contrast in a sign language if you’ve only learned a spoken languages before, compared to having previous knowledge in a sign language. Maybe someone has already tested this?
phonology in the 21 century: in honor of glyne piggott
When: May 7-9 2011
Where: McGill University
‘Phonology in the 21st Century: In Honour of Glyne Piggott’ is a conference to honour Glyne Piggott, who retired in May 2010 from McGill University. For over forty years, Prof. Piggott has been a supporter of the highest quality research in phonology. He is well recognized for maintaining the most rigorous approach to theory building and testing, coupled with intellectual breadth and curiosity. He instills in those around him the need to have a wide perspective on thinking in the field, and challenges his students to become independent scholars who will survive the theoretical whims of the time. Although the conference is organized to honour Prof. Piggott, its theoretical objective is to highlight phonological research at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, evaluating the contributions of the past forty years in light of the primary theoretical and empirical concerns of today.
experimental and theoretical advances in prosody
The special issue of Language and Cognitive Processes with contribution from the 2008 conference Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody has appeared online:
Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of an utterance. Prosody is critical for parsing speech, constructing syntactic structure, and building a representation of the conversational discourse model, among other linguistic functions.
In 2008, researchers from linguistics, psychology and computer science gathered at the inaugural meeting of the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody at Cornell University. The papers in this volume represent the cutting edge of the prosody work presented at that conference.
More …two new articles online
Michael Wagner and Katherine McCurdy. 2010. Poetic rhyme reflects cross-linguistic differences in information structure. Cognition 117. 166–175. [doi] [preprint]
Identical rhymes (right/write, attire/retire) are considered satisfactory and even artistic in French poetry but are considered unsatisfactory in English. This has been a consistent generalization over the course of centuries, a surprising fact given that other aspects of poetic form in French were happily applied in English. This paper puts forward the hypothesis that this difference is not merely one of poetic tradition, but is grounded in the distinct ways in which information-structure affects prosody in the two languages. A study of rhyme usage in poetry and a perception experiment confirm that native speakers’ intuitions about rhyming in the two languages indeed differ, and a further perception experiment supports the hypothesis that this fact is due to a constraint on prosody that is active in English but not in French. The findings suggest that certain forms of artistic expression in poetry are influenced, and even constrained, by more general properties of a language.
Mara Breen, Evelina Fedorenko, Michael Wagner and Edward Gibson: Acoustic correlates of information structure. 2010. _Language and Cognitive Processes_25.7. 1044–1098. [doi] [preprint]
This paper reports three studies aimed at addressing three questions about the acoustic correlates of information structure in English: (1) do speakers mark information structure prosodically, and, to the extent they do; (2) what are the acoustic features associated with different aspects of information structure; and (3) how well can listeners retrieve this information from the signal? The information structure of subjectverbobject sentences was manipulated via the questions preceding those sentences: elements in the target sentences were either focused (i.e., the answer to a wh-question) or given (i.e., mentioned in prior discourse); furthermore, focused elements had either an implicit or an explicit contrast set in the discourse; finally, either only the object was focused (narrow object focus) or the entire event was focused (wide focus). The results across all three experiments demonstrated that people reliably mark (1) focus location (subject, verb, or object) using greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0, and (2) focus breadth, such that narrow object focus is marked with greater intensity, longer duration, and higher mean and maximum F0 on the object than wide focus. Furthermore, when participants are made aware of prosodic ambiguity present across different information structures, they reliably mark focus type, so that contrastively focused elements are produced with greater intensity, longer duration, and lower mean and maximum F0 than noncontrastively focused elements. In addition to having important theoretical consequences for accounts of semantics and prosody, these experiments demonstrate that linear residualisation successfully removes individual differences in people’s productions thereby revealing cross-speaker generalisations. Furthermore, discriminant modelling allows us to objectively determine the acoustic features that underlie meaning differences.