phonoloblog | all things phonology | camba.ucsd.edu/phonoloblog

With great sadness, we note the passing of Hank Rogers of the University of Toronto. Follow the link to the obituary in the Globe and Mail.

A one-day conference on the subject of Word Accent: Theoretical and Typological Issues

will take place on Friday April 30th, 2010 (9.30 – 5.30) at the University of Connecticut.

(Location Nathan Inn Hotel, http://www.nathanhaleinn.com/)

Speakers: Matthew Gordon, Carlos Gussenhoven, Jeff Heinz, Harry van der Hulst, Brett Hyde, Larry Hyman, Ian Maddieson, Keren Rice, Lisa Selkirk

Organizer: Harry van der Hulst

For further information go to http://www.linguistics.uconn.edu/wordaccent/ (Program and abstracts will be posted soon).

Please write to harry.van.der.hulst@uconn.edu if you plan to come or have any further questions.

In case you missed it on LINGUIST List:

Postdoctoral Fellow in Computational Phonology
Department of Linguistics
The Ohio State University

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral position in the Department of Linguistics at The Ohio State University. The position will be primarily research-oriented, with a light teaching load of two courses per year. The ideal applicant will have a background in phonology with strong computational skills particularly with regards to the computational modeling of probabilistic patterns in language. The appointment will be for one year beginning on July 1, 2010, with the possibility of reappointment for an additional year.

Applicants should submit a current CV, a letter outlining relevant experience, a writing sample, and the names of three references to Elizabeth Hume.

Applications received prior to April 2, 2010 will be assured of receiving full consideration. For information about the OSU Department of Linguistics, please visit http://linguistics.osu.edu.

The Ohio State University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. Women, minorities, Vietnam-era veterans, disabled veterans, and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply.

Call for Papers

ACL 2010
Uppsala, Sweden
July 15

Eleventh Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Morphology, Phonology and Phonetics

The workshop will be held on July 15, immediately after the ACL 2010 meetings at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden.

The workshop website is: http://phonology.cogsci.udel.edu/sigmorphon2010/

Important Dates:
* Submission Deadline: April 25, 2010, 23:59 EDT
* Notification: May 19, 2010
* Camera-ready deadline: June 2, 2010
* Workshop: July 15 or 16, 2010

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Dear colleagues,
I don’t think it’s widely known that the 2011 summer institute courses are being chosen based on submissions, rather than through the usual invitation procedure. I’m posting this here because I thought that the risk of creating more competition for my own proposal was far outweighed by the chance of seeing some of you there.
Best,
Joe.

The 2011 Linguistic Institute, which will take place at the University of Colorado at Boulder from July 5 to August 5, 2011, is seeking proposals for courses to be offered at the Institute. The online submission process for these proposals is now available.

Call for proposals: http://verbs.colorado.edu/LSA2011/course_proposal.html

Institute website: http://verbs.colorado.edu/LSA2011/index.html

Online submission website: https://verbs.colorado.edu/pasha

E-mail contact: lsa2011atcoloradodotedu

Deadline for course proposals: January 15, 2010.

Major sponsors of the 2011 Linguistic Institute include the Linguistic Society of America and the Department of Linguistics, University of Colorado at Boulder.

UMass Linguistics is conducting a search in the context of a campus-wide hiring initiative in the area of Language, Experimentation, and Computation. Our position has been designated for either a psycholinguist (working “above the level of the word” - this could include prosody), or a specialist in computational and/or experimental approaches to phonological theory. The full ad can be found here.

The other positions are in Psycholinguistics in Psychology, and Natural Language Processing in Computer Science.

Hello All,

I just finished reading a draft of Matt Goldrick’s chapter from the upcoming Handbook of Phonological Theory (2nd Edition). I enjoyed it and found it helpful in the way it covers the relationship between theoretical work on generative grammar and psycholinguistic work. So, I wrote a short summary, which I’m posting

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Goldrick essentially reviews the role of phonotactics in psycholinguistic literature, but takes as a starting point the term “psychological reality” as it was used by Sapir (1933) to refer to the cognitive status of a grammar. Goldrick argues that it is vital for linguists to approach their research with at least some understanding of psychological reality—how things happen in real time, for instance—and that theories of grammar can only be improved by consideration of related data from the psycholinguistic literature.

As an example, Goldrick discusses the division between pre-lexical processing and lexical processing in the speech perception literature. Pre-lexical processing refers to a cognitive function which takes in fine-grained acoustic information (something like the signal sent along the auditory nerve) and spits out a pre-lexical but phonologically detailed representation. Lexical processing then takes this representation that has been passed to it and finds the corresponding entry in the mental lexicon . The term ‘function’ is used consistently to refer to a theoretical mapping of inputs (say, the signal from the auditory nerve) to outputs (phonemic representations). Following Marr (1982) and Smolensky (2006), Goldrick contrasts these levels of description with a higher algorithmic level—which details how a function is computed—and a lower neural level—which explains how the brain acheives a function. Of course, description at all three levels is necessary.

Goldrick works through evidence that categorical and gradient phonotactics influence both pre-lexical and lexical processing stages withing the larger cognitive task of single word recognition. As an example, identification tasks show listeners erroneously hear ill-formed sequences as well-formed ones; discrimination tasks show listeners have difficulty keeping separate words with ill-formed sequences and well-formed words that contain the likely repair strategies for the ill-formed words. Importantly, identification and discrimination errors do not always lead to real words, so they are arguably pre-lexical processing effects. More broadly, the reviewed psycholinguistic literature supports the existence of phonotactic representations apart from lexical ones, and it appears the representations are actively engaged in multiple cognitive functions, including both pre-lexical and lexical processing.

As something of a cautionary tale to linguistics, Goldrick talks about what can be gleaned from studies of wordlikeness judgments. First, he points out that the cognitive mechanisms employed in a judgment task are poorly defined (as Rob Fiorentino would say, it’s a very offline task), so it’s difficult to say what in the task reflects grammar (a mapping between surface and underlying forms) and what reflects other cognitive functions. We know, for example, that lexical neighborhood affects influence judgments (Bailey & Hahn, 2001). We also know from Luce and Vitevitch’s work (see refs below) that having real works in other tasks with nonwords increases the effects of lexical neighborhoods, and recently Shademan (2006, 2007) has shown that including real words in a judgment task does the same thing. Albright (2009) argues that the distribution of phonotactic probabilities within a nonword set also influences the relative roles of lexical and phonotactic effects on judgments. Finally, Goldrick notes that judgments may be the result of prior processes, such as perceptual effects that warp the percept. For example, Dupoux, Kakehi, Hirose, Pallier, and Mehler (1999) showed that Japanese listeners “repair” illegal consonant clusters by inserting an epenthetic vowel (cf. Berent et al., 2008, in PNAS).

For linguists, all the literature above means that claims to study competence apart from performance are not tenable, at least if our data are from wordlikeness tasks. We can’t study competence from these tasks because we know that the judgments are influenced by extra-grammatical factors. Therefore, Goldrick’s initial goal of emphasizing the importance of psychological reality within the study of linguistics holds. Beyond that, Goldrick offers several steps for future research, including some ideas for the study of the interaction of phonotactic and lexical knowledge.

Representative References

Albright, Adam (2009). Feature-based generalisation as a source of gradient acceptability. Phonology 26: 9-41.

Bailey, Todd M. and Ulrike Hahn (2001). Determinants of wordlikeness: Phonotactics or lexical neighborhoods? Journal of Memory and Language 44: 568-591.

Berent, Iris, Tracy Lennertz, Jongho Jun, Miguel A. Moreno, & Paul Smolensky (2008). Language universals in human brains. PNAS 105: 5321-5325.

Dupoux, Emmanuel, Kazuhiko Kakehi, Yuki Hirose, Christophe Pallier, and Jacque Mehler (1999). Epenthetic vowels in Japanese: A perceptual illusion? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 25:1568-1578.

Marr, David (1982). Vision. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company.

Sapir, Edward (1933). La Réalité psychologique des phonèmes. Journal de Psychologie Normale et Pathologuique 30: 247-265. English translation reprinted in David G. Mandelbaum (ed.) (1949), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality 46-60. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Shademan, Shabnam (2006). Is phonotactic knowledge grammatical knowledge? In Donald Baumer, David Montero, and Michael Scanlon (eds.) Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 371-379. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.

Smolensky, Paul (2006). Computational levels and integrated connectionist/symbolic explanation. In Paul Smolensky and Géraldine Legendre The Harmonic Mind: From Neural Computation to Optimality-Theoretic Grammar (Vol. 2, Linguistic and Philosophical Implications) 503-592. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Vitevitch, Michael S. (2003). The influence of sublexical and lexical representations in the processing of spoken words in English. Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics 17: 487-499.

Vitevitch, Michael S., Paul A. Luce (1999). Probabilistic phonotactics and neighborhood density in spoken word recognition. Journal of Memory and Language 40: 374-408.

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The Department of Linguistics of the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California invites applications for a one-year non-tenure-track Lecturer or one-year Adjunct Assistant Professor (non-tenure-track) for the academic year 2010-2011 to teach courses in phonology and assist in advising graduate students, from beginning to advanced. The position will involve teaching four courses, two in the fall semester and two in the spring semester. Teaching responsibilities are expected to include the following courses: courses from the first year graduate sequence in Phonology, a graduate seminar in Phonology, Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology (undergraduate), and Advanced Phonology (undergraduate).

The candidate must have completed all of the requirements for a Ph.D. in Linguistics or related field with a specialization in phonology by 1 August 2010. Candidates are requested to submit a curriculum vitae, cover letter describing experience and interests for both research and teaching, sample papers, and, if available, teaching evaluations. Applicants should also arrange for three letters of recommendation to be sent from individuals who are familiar with their work.

Electronic submission of application materials is strongly recommended. Materials should be submitted to the following email address with the subject heading “Phonology Search”:

phonology@college.usc.edu

In cases where hard copy submission is deemed necessary, materials should be sent to the following address.

Phonology Search Committee
Department of Linguistics
3601 Watt Way, Grace Ford Salvatori 301
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA 90089-1693

For fullest consideration, applications should be received by 1 February, 2010.

Questions about the position may be directed to the search committee chair, Rachel Walker, at rwalker@usc.edu.

The University of Southern California strongly values diversity and is committed to equal opportunity in employment. Women and men, and members of all racial and ethnic groups, are encouraged to apply.

Three newly released edited volumes caught my eye on LINGUIST List (here, here, and here), and I thought I’d mention them together in one post. Hey, they’re not completely unrelated, right?

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CALL FOR PAPERS

Eighteenth Manchester Phonology Meeting

20-22 MAY 2010

Deadline for abstracts: 1st February 2010

Special session: ‘Sociolinguistics, variation and phonology’, featuring Andries Coetzee, William Labov, Marc van Oostendorp and Jane Stuart-Smith.

Held at Hulme Hall, Manchester, England. Organised through a collaboration of phonologists at the University of Edinburgh, the University of Manchester, and elsewhere.

Conference website: www.englang.ed.ac.uk/mfm/18mfm.html

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