22 November 2011

Update on November highlights

More Travel:

Priyanka and Ouyang traveled to Vancouver (where Priyanka experienced her first snow fall!) and presented their work in the Western Conference on Linguistics:

Priyanka Biswas and Elsi Kaiser: A Psycholinguistic Investigation of Reference Resolution in Bangla

Chuoying Ouyang and Elsi Kaiser: Prosody and Information Structure in a Tone Language: An Investigation of Mandarin Chinese

06 November 2011

November highlights!

Here's some of the November news (so far!)

Travel:

Hagit Borer presented at the Arizona Linguistics Circle her work 'Roots and categories'. Also, a few days later (Friday 4th), she gave another talk, 'In the event of a nominal', at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Also, many faculty members and students travelled to San Diego to present their work at the Acoustical Society of America meeting (the list is LONG!):

Sergio Robles-Puente: Modeling imperatives in Spanish

Erika Varis: Phonetic vowel hiatus in Spanish

Christina Hagedorn, Mike Proctor, and Louis Goldstein (with Shrikanth
Narayanan): Automatic Analysis of Constriction Location in Singleton
and Geminate Consonant Articulation using Real-time Magnetic Resonance
Imaging

Daylen Riggs and Dani Byrd: The Scope of Prosodic Lengthening:
Articulatory and Acoustic Evidence

Khalil Iskarous: In defense of Discrete Features

Fang-Ying Hsieh: Diphthong centralization and reduction in constriction degree

Mike Proctor (with Athanasios Katsamanis): Prosodic characterization
of reading styles using audio book corpora

Mike Proctor (with Daniel Bone, Yoon Kim, and Shrikanth Narayanan):
Semi-automatic modeling of tongue surfaces using volumetric structural
MRI

Louis Goldstein and Mike Proctor (with Adam Lammert): Analysis of
rhythmic entrainment in speech production using real-time magnetic
resonance imaging

Sandy Disner (with Sean Fulop): Examining the voice bar

Canan Ipek: Acoustic correlates of narrow focus in Turkish

Ben Parrell, Louis Goldstein and Dani Byrd (with Adam Lammert and
Shrikanth Narayanan): Imaging and quantification of glottal kinematics
with ultrasound during speech

Edward Holsinger and Elsi Kaiser: An eye-tracking investigation of
contextual bias on idiom processing

Arunima Choudhury and Elsi Kaiser: Prosodic focus in Bangla: A
psycholinguistic investigation of production and perception

Michael Shepherd and Julia Wang: The role of elementary classroom discourse
in the initial construction of student identities

Daylen Riggs: Consonant clusters in loanwords: Fijian and cross-linguistic
data

Rachel Walker: Linguistics in a general education science course

Elsi Kaiser: Effects of information structure on the production and
comprehension of referring expressions.


Department Talks:

Syntax+:
Mary Byram-Washburn gave a Halloween syntax+ talk in which she presented a new study showing that English speakers, under the correct circumstances, won't reject nonexhaustive it-clefts as ungrammatical (aka: "It was John who was late" can allow Charles and Jane to also be late), as well as some old work analyzing the exhaustivity of it-clefts as a conversational implicature, instead of as a semantic necessity.

PhonLunch:
In another Halloween talk, Daylen Riggs gave a PhonLunch talk entitled "Consonant Cluster Adaptation in Loanwords".

Christina Hagedorn: Analysis of singletons and geminates using rt-MRI. Linguistics Reading Room. Nov 14th

Colloquium:

Michael Kenstowicz, from MIT, is the Linguistics Colloquium guest on Monday, November 7, 2011.
The PhonLunch group will also be meeting with him to discuss the paper "Contrasts, Mergers, and Acquisitions in Kyungsang Acccent" by Kenstowicz et al.

Ian Roberts, from Cambridge University, is the Linguistics Colloquium guest on Monday, November 14, 2011. His talk, 'Parameter Hierarchies and Comparative Syntax', looks at a way to break new ground in syntactic theory by reconceptualising the principles-and-parameters approach to comparative syntax, retaining its strengths and attempting to deal with its perceived weaknesses.

Also, professor Roberts has had the kindness to agree to teach a generative syntax class the following day (Nov 15th), to which the students are really looking forward.