information structure and production planning
Just posted a forthcoming review paper on information structure and production planning on the semantics archive:
More …lalala
Earlier this week some of us went to McGill’s gorgeous Gault nature reserve for a l anguage l abs l ab meeting ( lalala ).
Students from Meghan Clayards’s Speech Learning Lab, Florian Jaeger’s HLP lab, Chigusa Kurumada’s Kinder Lab, Morgan Sonderegger’s Montreal Language Modeling Lab, and Michael Wagner’s prosody.lab presented on current projects.
[photo: gui garcia]
Research presentations:
- Esteban Buz: Contextual confusability, feedback and their effects on speech production
- Guilherme Garcia: Stress and gradient weight in Portuguese
- Dan Goodhue: It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it: Intonation, yes, and no
- Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron: Phrasing and phonological variability
- Linda Liu: Learning under causal uncertainty in speech perception
- Amanda Pogue: Exploring expectations based on speaker-specific variation in informativity
Idea talks:
- Zach Burchill: Are accents hard to learn?
- Guilherme Garcia: Second language acquisition of English stress by Québec French speakers
- Sarah Colby: Effects of normal aging on perceptual flexibility for speech
- Dan Goodhue: Towards a probabilistic explanation of contextual evidence
- Dave Kleinschmidt: Learning to adapt
- Maryam Seifeldin: Adaptation to and generalization of unfamiliar phonetic features
LaLaLa was co-sponsored by funds to the PIs of all participating labs
etap3--deadline this monday!
Experimental and Theoretical Advances in Prosody (ETAP) 3: Prosody and Variability
Date: 28-May-2015 - 30-May-2015
Location: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Call for Papers
Deadline: January 11 2015
Tools for Linguistic Fieldwork and Experimentation
Tomorrow at the LSA Meeting in Portland, there’ll be a tutorial on LingSync and ProsodyLab-Aligner: Tools for Linguistic Fieldwork and Experimentation. If you plan on attending and would like to try out the Prosodylab-Aligner while being there, you should try to install the aligner beforehand. You’ll find it here:
The aligner has just undergone some revisions, and we currently only have installation instructions for the new aligner for Mac users:
Prosdoylab-Aligner: Installation Instructions for Mac Users
Please keep tuned for updates in the coming week, since we’re still finalizing the documentation of the new features and changes. In the meantime, if you’d like to use the old aligner (compatible with the video tutorial below), then you can still install that here:
recent work
McClay, Elise & Michael Wagner (in press). Accented Pronouns and Contrast. To appear in the Proceedings of the 50th Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society in 2014. [paper]
Abstract: Both the lack of accentuation on a referring expression and the choice of a pronoun over a full noun phrase have been tied to a higher accessibility of the referent. Why, then, would a pronoun ever be accented? We consider three perspectives: Kameyama’s (1999) Complementary Preference Hypothesis, Smyth’s (1994) Parallel Function view, and Rooth’s (1992) Alternatives Theory of Focus, and present experimental evidence in favour of the focus view. We conclude by noting issues with respect to the definition of contrast that arise when considering cases of multiple foci as in the data of our experiments.
Wagner Michael (in press). Phonological Evidence in Syntax? In: Tibor Kiss and Artemis Alexiadou (Eds.): Syntax – Theory and Analysis. An International Handbook. Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science. 42. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2015 [paper]
Abstract: Linguistic constituents that encode salient information are often prosodically reduced. Recent studies have presented evidence that higher contextual accessibility of referents results in lower prosodic prominence. Accounts of reduction in terms of accessibility set out to explain a range of phenomena that include those that are in the domain of linguistic theories of focus and givenness. The tacit assumption is that more general and independently motivated accessibility factors will be able to supplant the more specialized grammatical accounts of prosodic prominence. This paper reviews previous results and finds that existing accessibility accounts cannot explain a range of data easily captured by the alternatives theory of focus, and that various experimental studies motivating the accessibility view actually fail to distinguish between the two accounts. New experimental data is presented that teases apart the effects of accessibility and linguistic focus.
Wagner, Michael & Jeffrey Klassen (in press). Accessibility is no Alternative to Alternatives. To appear in Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. [paper]
Abstract: Linear precedence is one of the key sources of evidence for the syntactic structure of complex expressions, but other aspects of the phonological representation of a sentence, such as its prosody, are often not considered when testing syntactic theories. This overview provides an introduction to the three main dimensions of sentence prosody, phrasing, prominence and intonational tune, focusing on how they can enter syntactic argumentation.
prosody and constituent structure
The conference eti3: Prosody and Constituency at McGill (co-organized by Emily Elfner, Jessica Coon, Lisa Travis, and myself) is now over. Thanks everyone for participating!
accented pronouns
Handout for the talk we’ll be presenting at CLS today:
Elise McClay & Michael Wagner: Accented unambiguous English pronouns: Complementary Preference, Parallel function, or Focus?
Comments welcome!
two papers on intonational tunes
… to be presented next week at semdial:
Daniel Goodhue, James Pickett and Michael Wagner. English reverse prosody in re- sponses to yes-no questions. Proceedings of Semantics of Dialogue (Semdial). [paper]
Wagner, Michael, Lauren Mak and Elise McClay. Incomplete Answers and the Rise- Fall-Rise Contour. Proceedings of Semantics of Dialogue (Semdial). [paper]
Dorit Abusch and Mats Rooth Talks
Dorit Abusch and Mats Rooth will give talks as part of a special issue of the Semantics Reading Group this Thursday, October 10, Leacock 738.
2.30-3.45pm Mats Rooth (Cornell University): Focus over new, farmer sentences, and directionality in focus licensing.
3.45pm Refreshments
4.00-5.15pm Dorit Abusch (Cornell University): Anaphoric relations in sequential and conflated pictures
Everybody is welcome.
Prosodylab Aligner Demo Pt 2
Next in our series of tutorial videos is how to use the options available through the Prosodylab Aligner, like using a different phonetic dictionary or training new models. Take a look if you’re interested & want to know more!