So, here’s my question: do acronyms generally have social stigma when compared to a competing initialism (or alphabetization, as I was taught)? Is this a case of a prescriptively bad phonological process?

Note: A brief search didn’t turn up discussion of this issue on Language Log, although the acronym/initialism distinction seems well covered. And here’s a sampling of pronunciations from Nintendo fans!

When and where: University of Alberta, Edmonton, February 13-14, 2010.  Robert Kirchner and Anne-Michelle Tessier, organizers

Theme: Major advances have been made in recent years towards explicit  modelling of phonological acquisition, including increasingly  sophisticated OT learning algorithms, as well as application of general machine learning techniques (e.g. expectation maximization and maximum entropy learning). At the same time, evidence of token and type frequency sensitivity in the propagation of both categorical and gradient patterns in speech has spurred growing interest in exemplar-based models of acquisition and processing.  This workshop aims to bring together these two strands of research, promoting dialogue between those pursuing symbolic and subsymbolic approaches to acquisition of the sound patterns of spoken language. We invite oral and poster presentations from phonologists, phoneticians, psycholinguists, computational linguists, and speech scientists on this general theme.  Though relevant analytic, programmatic, or experimental presentations are also welcome, priority will be given to abstracts reflecting original computational modelling results for some aspect of phonological/phonetic acquisition.

Invited speakers will include: Adam Albright (MIT), Michael Becker (Harvard), Andries Coetzee (Michigan), Robert Daland (UCLA), Bruce Hayes (UCLA), Jeff Mielke (Ottawa), Ben Munson (Minnesota), James Myers (CCU, Taiwan), Janet Pierrehumbert (Northwestern), Alan Yu (Chicago).  Titles to be announced.

Funding and registration fee: The organizers anticipate sufficient funding to cover travel and hotel costs of all presenters whose abstracts are accepted, above and beyond the invited speakers.  A registration fee of $70 ($50 students) will be charged to cover the cost of coffee break refreshments.  Late registration (after Jan. 1, 2010) is $100 ($75 students).  Registrants are encouraged to order tickets for a Saturday evening banquet, at an additional cost of $35.  All prices are in Canadian dollars.

Submission: Abstracts for oral or poster presentations should be no longer than one page (US letter or A4, 11 pt, 1 inch margins) with a second page for references, data and/or figures. Abstracts should be emailed as a PDF attachment to

phonmod@ualberta.ca, deadline: midnight (Mountain Time), November 20, 2009.

Unless the submitter indicates otherwise, the organizers will consider each abstract’s suitability for oral or poster presentation. Authors should include the title, name(s), and affiliation(s) in the body of the email.

See http://www.ualberta.ca/~kirchner/cmspa.htm for more information.

Salary is competitive and commensurate with qualifications. The position also provides funds for computer facilities and professional travel. Mellon postdoctoral fellows are expected to participate fully in Northwestern’s interdisciplinary research environment, teach a one-quarter lecture course and a one-quarter seminar per year, and present one colloquium per year.

For fullest consideration, candidates should ensure that their application arrives in the Department before December 1, 2009. APPLICATIONS BY E-MAIL WILL NOT BE ACCEPTED. The application should include the candidate’s CV (indicating an e-mail address), statements of research and teaching interests, teaching evaluations (if available), and reprints or other written work. (Finalists will be asked to submit a copy of the dissertation, or completed portions thereof, at a later date; it is not necessary to do so at this time.) Candidates should arrange to have 3-4 letters of reference sent directly to the search committee by the application deadline; if possible, one of the letters should specifically address the applicant’s teaching qualifications.

Send all materials to:
Mellon Search Committee
Department of Linguistics
Northwestern University
2016 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208-4090
(Tel: 847-491-7020, Fax: 847-491-3770)

E-mail inquiries should be directed to mellon@ling.northwestern.edu. The web page for the Department is: http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/linguistics.

Northwestern University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer, and applications from minority and women candidates are especially welcome. The fellowship is open to non-US citizens, as long as the necessary permit to work in the US is in hand prior to September 1, 2010.

The Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences and the Department of Psychology announce that we will seek to fill four positions in language and linguistics over the next three years. Here we invite applications for an open-rank position in Phonetics/Phonology beginning July 1, 2010. Research focus is open, but we especially value programs of research that cross traditional boundaries of topics and methodology, including theoretical approaches. Interests in cross-linguistic and/or developmental research are highly desirable. The individual filling this position must be able to teach an introductory phonology course as well as a course in experimental phonetics. Additional positions that we will be hiring include a current search in (a) syntactic/semantic/pragmatic language processing, and two others tentatively in the areas of (b) lexical representation and processing, morphology, and/or word formation; and (c) computational modeling, cognitive neuroscience, and/or biology of language. Successful candidates are expected to have (1) a track record of excellence in research, (2) a well-specified research plan, and (3) a readiness to contribute to undergraduate and graduate teaching and mentoring. Brown has a highly interdisciplinary research environment in the study of mind, brain, behavior, and language and is establishing an integrated Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences, effective July 2010. Plans to house the department in a newly renovated state-of-the-art building in the heart of campus are well under way. Curriculum vitae, reprints and preprints of publications, statements of research and teaching interests (one page each), and three letters of reference (for junior applicants) or names of five referees (for senior applicants) should be submitted on-line as PDFs to PhoneticsPhonologySearch@brown.edu, or else by mail to Phonetics/Phonology Search Committee, Department of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences, Box 1978, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912 USA. Applications received by January 5, 2010 are assured of full review. All Ph.D. requirements must be completed before July 1, 2010. Women and minorities are especially encouraged to apply. Brown University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer.

I’m posting some scattered notes from last week’s Neurobiology of Language Conference (Thurs, Oct 15 – Fri, Oct 16, 2009; Chicago, IL). These are largely idiosyncratic as I’m not a neuroscientist and, for many presentations and almost all posters, I didn’t take detailed notes. If there are others out there that attended, you may want to supplement this posting. Well, here we go!

Panel Discussion: Motor Contribution to Speech Percetion: Essential or Ancillary?
Speakers: Luciano Fadiga (U Ferrara, Italy) and Gregory Hickok (UC Irvine, US)

Summary: The panel discussions were essentially debates with additional input from moderators and the audience. This panel discussion was in many ways a discussion about the Motor Theory of speech perception (Liberman & Mattingly, 1985) and the revival this theory has seen following the discovery of mirror neurons. Luciano argued for something like an updated Motor Theory: “Our hypothesis is that the motor system [specifically, the motor cortex and mirror neurons therein] provides fundamental information to perceptual processing of speech sounds and that this contribution becomes fundamental to focus attention on others’ speech” (from the abstract, prose in brackets was added by me). Greg argued that neuroscientific data does not support Motor Theory. In particular, the fact that lesions to the motor cortex do not prevent accurate speech perception fundamentally undermines any claim about the “necessity” of motor areas for speech perception and, by extension, the lesion data undermines Motor Theory.

My personal bias here is in opposition to Motor Theory. Rather than belaboring the point, I will refer you to Greg’s blog, Talking Brains (co-managed by David Poeppel), where he has posted extensively over the past few months about the shortcomings of both Motor Theory and claims about the importance of mirror neurons in speech perception. In fact, it’s worth noting that everyone at the conference was in agreement that there is relatively poor documentation regarding the mere existence of mirror neurons in humans (cf. recent polemic article by Caramazza and colleagues). They also agreed that mirror neurons are probably there, but it seems premature to make a very strong claim about how these neurons might affect speech perception at this time, especially when auditory models of speech perception are, well, kind of obvious. And good.

A final personal note: Phonology is constructed from perception in many ways.

Panel Discussion Highlights:

• Luciano distances himself from what he calls mirror neuron “trash”, including the Magical Tapping Bears (40£ a bear!!! omg!!!)
• Attendee Tom Bever claims that, contrary to popular belief, he and moderator Michael Arbib are not old enough to have known William James. Michael responds that he knew William James.
• Luciano makes to end the session by saying that he really needs a cigarette. Moderator Michael Arbib concludes the session by saying, “Well folks, I guess it’s all been a lot of smoke and mirrors.”

Keynote Lecture: What can Brain Imaging Tell Us about Developmental Disorders of Speech and Language?
Speaker: Kate Watkins (U Oxford, UK)

Summary: Kate gave the only developmental keynote address, so naturally I was most engaged here. She’s fairly well known for her work with the KE family (Note that the KE family provided us with evidence that some language functioning depends on the FOXP2 gene. Some of the seminal research on this gene was done by Simon Fisher, another keynote speaker at the conference). Recently, Kate has branched out to neuroimaging studies of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and developmental stuttering. This was not entirely clear to me before I heard her talk, but just in case anyone else out there is confused, developmental disorders such as SLI and stuttering rarely arise from lesions. Rather, they appear to result from myriad issues of neuronal size and number, as well as myelination. Kate’s research has shown that there are some interesting neurological correlates to these disorders, however. For example, children with SLI, like members of the KE family, have less gray matter in the caudate nucleus, a subcortical region implicating a motor deficit. Siblings of children with SLI also have diminutive caudate nuclei, suggesting that the size of this region primarily reflects a risk factor, and that many of the disorder’s sequelae must arise from something more complicated than a lone impaired region.

The other finding I thought worth mentioning is that children with SLI also show cortical areas with greater gray matter mass than their normally developing peers (but also reduced neural activity), including in the left frontal opercular cortex (posterior half of Broca’s area). Kate didn’t really discuss the behavioral outcomes of increased gray matter, but she suggested that the increase was likely the result of abnormal gyrification, or brain folding. Cool.

Personal note: One of my advisors here at Purdue, Larry Leonard, wrote the book on SLI.

Highlights:

• Kate is the only female keynote speaker, bringing some relief to what often felt like a boy’s-only club
• The presentation starts with Kate appearing to be a pleasant but disorganized British academic type who can’t seem to figure out how to get her slides to project. Oops! Turns out that the A/V staff hadn’t turned the projector on!

I’m finding that just covering these two sections has exhausted me, so this’ll be all for now. I may review some of the posters I liked sometime in the coming week, but some enouragement might be helpful to make it happen.

Peter

The 12th Conference on Laboratory Phonology,
to be held at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, NM, USA.

Dates of conference: 8-10 July 2010
Theme: Gesture as Language, Gesture and Language.
More information at conference website http://www.unm.edu/~labfon12/

Deadline for abstract submission: 20 November 2009
Notification of acceptance: 1 February 2010

Call for Papers

Abstracts are solicited for contributed papers for presentation as 30-minute oral contributions or as posters. Contributions relating to the conference themes are especially encouraged; there will also be sessions for non-thematic papers.

The overall theme for the conference is “Gesture as language, gesture and language.” Our goal is to bring together researchers who have a gestural perspective on language to encourage cross-fertilization between different approaches and areas of research. Some specific topics that address this theme are the following:

- Speech as gesture. How are gestures used to create phonological structure? What are the fundamental gestural units, and how are they coordinated? How discrete or continuous are the gestures of language? How parallel or different are the gestural organization of spoken and signed languages?
- Phonology of signed languages. The same issues are relevant for signed languages as for spoken languages.
- Gesture with language. How are non-linguistic gestures used in concert with language? How are these gestures coordinated with speech? How similar or different are the non-linguistic gestures accompanying spoken and signed languages, and are their functions similar across modalities?
- Audiovisual aspects of speech. To what extent are visual cues exploited in spoken language communication? How are aural and visual information integrated?
- Diversity of speech gestures, focusing on Native American languages. How varied are the gestures used by different languages? How does this diversity inform our understanding of phonological structure?
- Modulation of linguistic gestures through prosody or sound change. How are gestures modified by linguistic or communicative context? What are the natural paths of change over time in the gestural structure of languages? How are phonological systems affected by such changes? How is the effect of prosody similar, or different, in signed and spoken language? What different effects does prosody have on gestures produced using different articulators, in speech or in sign?

Abstracts are to be submitted as a PDF file containing an anonymous one-page abstract at the following address:
http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=labphon12.

GLOW Workshop on Phonology and Phonetics
Positional Phenomena in Phonology and Phonetics
(Organised by Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin)

Date: 13 April 2010
Organisers: Marzena Zygis, Stefanie Jannedy, Susanne Fuchs

Invited Speakers:
Taehong Cho (Hanyang University, Seoul) confirmed
Grzegorz Dogil (University of Stuttgart) confirmed

Venue: Instytut Filologii Angielskiej, ul. Kuznicza 22, 50-138 Wroclaw

Abstracts due November 1, 2009.

2nd Call for Papers

Positional effects found cross-linguistically at the edges of prosodic constituents (e.g. final lengthening, final lowering, strengthening effects, or final devoicing) have increasingly received attention in phonetic-phonological research. Recent empirical investigations of such positional effects and their variability pose, however, a great number of questions challenging e.g. the idea of perceptual invariance. It has been claimed that acoustic variability is a necessary prerequisite for the perceptual system to parse segmental strings into words, phrases or larger prosodic units.

This workshop will provide a forum for discussing controversies and recent developments regarding positional phenomena. We invite abstracts bearing on positional effects from various perspectives. The following questions can be addressed, but are not limited to:

- What kind of variability is found in the data, and how does such variability need to be accounted for?
- What positional effects are common cross-linguistically and how can they be attributed to perceptual, articulatory or aerodynamic principles?
- How does positional prominence (lexical stress; accent) interact with acoustic and articulatory realizations of prosodic boundaries?
- What are the positional (a)symmetries in the realizations of boundaries, and what are the mechanisms underlying them?
- How does left- and right-edge phrasal marking interact with the acoustic and articulatory realizations at these prosodic boundaries?
- How are these interpreted in phonetics and in phonology?
- What are the necessary prerequisites for the interpretation of prosodic constituents? Which auditory cues are essential for the perception of boundaries and positional effects? Are such cues language-specific?
- To what extent do lexical frequency, phonotactic probability, and neighbourhood density contribute to the production and recognition of prosodic boundaries in (fluent/spontaneous) speech?
- How are positional characteristics exploited during the process of language acquisition? How are they learned during the process of language acquisition? Are positional effects salient enough for L2 learners?

The Contrastive Hierarchy in Phonology

B. Elan Dresher

Cambridge Studies in Linguistics No. 121

‘Contrast’ — the opposition between distinctive sounds in a language — is one of the most central concepts in linguistics. This book presents an original account of the logic and history of contrast in phonology. It provides empirical evidence from diverse phonological domains that only contrastive features are computed by the phonological component of grammar. It argues that the contrastive specifications of phonemes are governed by language-particular feature hierarchies. This approach assigns a key role to abstract cognitive structures, challenging contemporary approaches that favour phonetic explanations of phonological phenomena. Tracing the evolution of the hypothesis that contrastive features play a special role in phonology, it shows how this insight has been obscured by misunderstandings of the role of the contrastive feature hierarchy. Questioning the widely held notion that contrast should be based on minimal pairs, Elan Dresher argues that the contrastive hierarchy is indispensable to illuminating accounts of phonological patterning.

1. Introduction;
2. The logic of contrast;
3. Contrast in structuralist phonology;
4. The rise and fall of the contrastive hierarchy;
5. Generative phonology: Contrast goes underground;
6. Contrast in optimality theory;
7. Evidence for the contrastive hierarchy in phonology;
8. Other approaches to contrast in phonology;
9. Conclusion.

‘Mao Kong Forum’ is established by the Mao Kong Graduate Student Phonology Group at the National Chengchi University (NCCU) in Taipei. It will begin with a phonology conference this year. The conference is open to a wide range of submissions by international graduate students.

Theme: Modern phonology (theoretical or experimental)
Organized by: Mao Kong Graduate Student Phonology Group, NCCU
Venue: Conference Room 2 and 5, 7th Floor, Administration Building, NCCU
Language: Chinese and English

Keynote Speakers:
Wang, H. Samuel (Department of Foreign Language and Applied Linguistics, Yuan Ze University)
Huang, Hui-Chuan (Institute of Linguistics, National Tsing Hua University)

Invited Speakers:
Lin, Hui-Shan (Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University)
Wee, Lian-Hee (Department of English Language and Literature, Hong Kong Baptist University)

1. Please email the abstract together with the submission form to MPC committee by October 1, 2009 (Thursday).
2. Please do not include author information in the abstract.

Notification of Acceptance: November 9, 2009 (Monday)

Please download the submission form here. For further information, please visit the following URL: http://www.wretch.cc/blog/mpcnccu.