if you’d like to get a digest emails with posts to this blog, you can subscribe to it here (or use the link in the sidebar). This is a low traffic blog with prosody-related posts. Some of the information posted here is about local events, and I haven’t figured out how to allow readers who don’t live in Montréal to filter these out of the digest emails, so if you subscribe to the email you might get some of these.
The Prosodylab-Aligner is a set of Python and shell scripts for performing automated alignment of text to audio of speech using Hidden Markov Models developed in our lab by Kyle Gorman. It is designed to be easy to use as possible, and with laboratory data in mind. While it ships with pre-trained North American English phoneme models based on data collected in our lab, it also supports training on arbitrary data.
Prosody in the lab is a class that I’m currently teaching at the 2011 LSA Institute at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I’ve posted more information on class website.
The etap deadline was extended until June 1st. See the conference website for the call for papers.
The CRLMB and CRMMT are hosting a workshop on rhythm in speech and music at mcgill this week. I’m copying the announcement:
CIRMMT Distinguished Lecture by Dr. Ani Patel (co-sponsored by CRLMB)
Dr. Ani Patel (The Neurosciences Institute) will give a lecture entitled “Relations between linguistic and nonlinguistic sound systems: Empirical studies,” on April 21st in the Clara Lichtenstein Recital Hall (C-209), Strathcona Music Building, 555 Sherbrooke St. West, Montreal at 4:30 p.m. until 6:00 p.m.
More …Just came across ‘neuroblaste’, Radio Canada’s pretty awsome animated series about good old neuroscience in Montréal… you know, the MKULTRA-type of research, that you may have encountered in your ethics training on experiments with human subjects (the show is in French):
If you’re in Canada, you can watch all episodes here.
Two talks on Friday, April 8 2011 at McGill within a block’s distance:
Cognitive Brownbag Seminar:
Elena Koulaguina & Rushen Shi (Uqam): Abstract rules, exceptions and morphological markings in early language acquisition
Time: 11:30-12:30pm
Location: S3/4 Stewart Bio
Special Edition of the GRIPP reading group:
Khalil Iskarous (Fullbright Fellow at CRLMB/Haskins): The Geometry of Statistics
Time: 12.45-2.15pm
Location: Rabinovitch 101/Boardroom, located at 3640 de la Montagne
The program for this year’s MOT in honor of Glyne Pigott is now posted.
Registration is now open. Note that if you want to attend the banquet, you’ll have to register by April 18.
You’ll find information about accommodation here.
Richard Aslin (University of Rochester, USA) is giving a Hebb Colloquium tomorrow.
Time: 3.30pm.
Location: Room S1/3 in the Stewart Psychology Building at McGill.
The Dynamics of Information Processing in Infants: Eye-tracking and Neuroimaging.
Abstract: Infants are capable of rapidly learning the distributional properties of information in a wide variety of domains. This mechanism of statistical learning will be discussed in both the auditory (language) and visual domains, paying particular attention to the types of constraints that enable such learning to be tractable and efficient. Recently, we have asked whether infants prefer to attend to (and presumably process) information that is neither too simple nor too complex. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we provide evidence in support of this bias, which we call the Goldilocks effect. We have also been developing a non-invasive optical imaging method to assess the neural correlates of learning. Preliminary results provide insights about the relative weights attached to visual and auditory information in infants’ attention and learning.
prosody.lab-related posters at cuny:
Hyekyung Hwang, Michael Wagner and Karsten Steinhauer: On word order, prosody, and focus. [abstract]
Efrat Pauker, Michael Wagner, Meghan Clayards, Hyekyung Hwang, Shari Baum and Karsten Steinhauer: Relative prosodic boundary strength and syntactic ambiguity resolution. [abstract]
Andrea Santi, Nino Grillo, Yosef Grodzinsky and Michael Wagner: Planned Production and Self-Paced Reading of Relative Clause Attachment. [abstract] [poster]
Michael Wagner: Studying Variation in the Lab with Larger Scale Production Experiments. [abstract] [poster]
Michael Wagner & Aron Hirsch: Prosodic Prominence in English Intransitive Sentences. [abstract] [poster]
