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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231208T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231208T130000
DTSTAMP:20231005T103356Z
CREATED:20231005T103356Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231005T103356Z
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SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Alexis Wellwood: Temporal constitution in language and mind
DESCRIPTION:Location – Dodd 146 \nTemporal constitution in language and mind \nSemanticists 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 of experiments\, we tested whether different sorts of subtle differences in “temporal shaping” across different types of dynamic displays would be sufficient to predict preference for resolving a novel verb as event-y or process-y. For example\, a circle moves continuously back-and-forth across the screen\, with movement broken up into equi-sized temporal portions separated by brief pauses (event-y) or not (process-y). In forced choice tasks\, we asked whether people would differentially choose deverbal count syntax (The circle did some gleebs) versus mass (The circle did some gleebing) to describe such scenes. In quantity estimation tasks\, we tested whether they would differentially track natural number versus some continuous dimension for verbal comparatives (The circle gleebed more than the square did). Indeed\, we found preference for count syntax and number-based quantification with event-y scenes\, but no categorical preference for process-y scenes. In the talk\, I suggest how to make sense of such findings on the linguistic and nonlinguistic sides. Specifically\, I suggest that semantic description combines (linguistic-)syntactic and conceptual(-syntactic) information\, with functional meanings directing binding relations across distinct core knowledge domains.
URL:https://temp.linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-alexis-wellwood/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231201T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231201T130000
DTSTAMP:20231005T102622Z
CREATED:20231005T102622Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231005T102622Z
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SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Morgan Sonderegger: New perspectives on speech variability from large-scale studies
DESCRIPTION:Location – Dodd 146 \nNew perspectives on speech variability from large-scale studies \nI 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 manual processing. \nThe first study asks how much “the same” phonetic effects vary across languages\, and what their distributions can tell us. It is well known that vowel F0 tends to be higher for high vowels compared to low vowels (VF0) and F0 following voiceless obstruents tends to be higher than F0 following voiced obstruents (CF0). These “intrinsic F0” effects have been extensively investigated\, but largely in lab speech in individual languages\, making it difficult to settle the long-standing questions of to what extent they are “automatic” versus “controlled”\, and whether cross-linguistic variation can be systematically explained (e.g. smaller VF0/CF0 in tone languages). We map out the distribution of intrinsic F0 effects across 20 languages\, using large corpora of read speech. We find that both VF0 and CF0 effects are robust across languages in terms of effect direction\, but that languages vary greatly in VF0 and CF0 effect size. Most of this variability appears to be unexplained by phonological properties of the language (e.g. tone). Finally\, we find that the CF0 effect is larger than the VF0 effect in almost every language\, and the CF0 effect is more variable across languages. These patterns suggest a possible explanation for the cross-linguistic tendency for CF0 effects to lead to sound change (“tonogenesis”) much more often than VF0 effects. (Joint work with Connie Ting & Meghan Clayards) \nA second study is part of the SPeech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) project\, which examined existing datasets of Old World (British) and New World (North American) English spanning 100+ years\, to gain an improved understanding of stability and variation in a spoken language across space and time. We consider variability in English sibilants in 5k speakers from 27 geo-social-ethnic regions. We analyse spectral peak measures using a Bayesian statistical model which explicitly models token\, speaker\, and region- level variability. Following previous phonetic and sociolinguistic research we expected English /s/ to be more variable than /sh/\, and for both sounds to look broadly similar across dialects. The results\, however\, differ according to the level at which we consider variability — for example\, /s/ is more variable within-speaker than /sh/\, but not more variable across  regions. Our results likely reflect physical and social-indexical sources of variation\, and connect to basic issues in sociolinguistics and sound change. (Joint work with Jane Stuart-Smith\, Jeff Mielke)
URL:https://temp.linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-morgan-sonderegger/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231027T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231027T130000
DTSTAMP:20231005T102540Z
CREATED:20231005T102540Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231005T102540Z
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SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Meredith Tamminga: Language users' expectations shape phonetic flexibility
DESCRIPTION:  \nLocation – Dodd 146 \n\n\nLanguage users’ expectations shape phonetic flexibility \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLanguage 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 two case studies on how phonetic flexibility is influenced by language users’ expectations. The first case study is on expectation-driven convergence\, which is when speakers converge toward a regional accent feature that they expect\, but crucially do not hear\, from an interlocutor. In work with Lacey Wade and Dave Embick\, we show that people with different dialect backgrounds exhibit expectation-driven convergence triggered by different kinds of sociolinguistic expectations. The second case study is on cross-talker generalization in perceptual learning\, which is when listeners shift a perceptual category boundary based on input from one talker and then\, under some circumstances\, extend that expectation to a different talker. In work with Wei Lai\, we propose that perceptual learning involves learning both a bias toward identifying a particular phonological category and a new phonetic boundary between two phonemes\, and that listeners will generalize the shift only when those two aspects of what they have learned match. I conclude with reflections on the thematic parallels between these two case studies and potential implications for understanding larger-scale phenomena like language change.
URL:https://temp.linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-meredith-tamminga/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230512T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20230512T130000
DTSTAMP:20230306T093208Z
CREATED:20230306T093208Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20230306T093208Z
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SUMMARY:Colloquium: Jennifer Kuo
DESCRIPTION:Location: Haines Hall 220 \nWhen phonological learning is not statistical: how learning biases have reshaped Malagasy paradigms \nOne 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 learning is influenced by various linguistically-motivated biases\, such as a bias towards less complex patterns. One way to tease apart these effects is to look at how learners behave when presented with conflicting data patterns––they do not always replicate the language they hear from their parents\, and their errors (such as goed instead of went) can be informative\, telling us about what biases are present in learning. Such errors can be adopted into speech communities and passed through generations of speakers\, resulting in reanalysis of a data pattern. \nIn this talk\, I look at reanalyses over time in Malagasy and show that reanalysis is not entirely predictable from statistical distributions. Instead\, I argue that Malagasy reanalysis is sensitive to both frequency-matching and a markedness bias\, using an iterated version of Maximum Entropy Harmonic Grammar (Smolensky 1986; Goldwater & Johnson\, 2003) that simulates the cumulative effect of reanalyses across generations of speakers. I further propose that the markedness effects active in reanalysis are restricted to those already present in the language as a phonotactic tendency\, and show that this is the case for Malagasy. These results demonstrate how findings from language change over time\, combined with quantitative modeling\, can give us insight into phonological learning.
URL:https://temp.linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-jennifer-kuo/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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