This week we will be hosting Savithry Namboodiripad of the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on how language contact affects linguistic variation, in particular constituent order in the world’s languages. Her dissertation examined this question in Malayalam via psycholinguistic experimental methodology (you can read more here: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sv6z8bz). Please see below for information about her […]
Continue reading →Please join LVC this Friday, December 2 at 3:30 PM in Rosenwald 301. It will be our last meeting of the quarter and our speaker is our own Jacob Phillips. Hope you can make it! “Retraction in Action: Examining phonological and prosodic effects on /s/-retraction in the laboratory” Jacob Phillips University of Chicago An ongoing […]
Continue reading →Friday, April 1st at 3:00PM, location TBA Frames of reference in discourse: Spatial descriptions in Bashkir (Turkic) Tatiana Nikitina CNRS, Paris Cross-linguistic and individual variation in the use of spatial reference frames has been one of the central questions in the study of semantic typology (Pederson et al. 1998; Levinson 2003, inter alia). It is […]
Continue reading →Friday, December 4th @ 3:00PM in Rosenwald 301 Understanding Basque Differential Object Marking from Typological, Contact and Attitudinal perspectives Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Differential Object Marking (DOM) has enjoyed abundant scholarly interest insomuch as theoretical explanations of its key parameters (Aissen 2003; Malchukov and Swart 2008; Hoop and Swart 2007), language-specific constraints […]
Continue reading →Friday, November 6th @ 3:00PM in Rosenwald 301 Intrinsic and Contextual Cues to Tone Perception In Medʉmba (or: A How-To Guide for Doing Phonetics Experiments in the Field) Kathryn Franich University of Chicago In this talk, I discuss results of experimental work on tone perception in Medʉmba, a Grassfields Bantu language spoken in Cameroon. The […]
Continue reading →Monday, April 28th @ 3:00 PM, Cobb 104 Processing Difficulty and the Envelope of Variation A longstanding problem in the study of syntactic variation is determining the envelope of variation. That is, what are the variants that speakers choose among when they speak? This problem is usually thought of in terms of semantic equivalency: are […]
Continue reading →Monday, February 24th @ 3:00 PM, Kent 107 Investigating phonetic variation over time in the U.S. Supreme Court Phonetic research over the past two decades has shown that individual speakers vary their phonetic realizations of words, phonemes, and subphonemic features. What we have found is that speakers show remarkable stability over time, while a small […]
Continue reading →Monday, October 21st @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Variation in fingerspelling: time, pinky extension, and what it means to be active This talk will look at two sources of variation in fingerspelling of American Sign Language: overall timing, and one aspect of hand shape. Reported fingerspelling rates have considerable variation (a lower bound of ~125msec […]
Continue reading →Monday, October 7th @ 3 PM, Harper 140 Voice-specific lexicons: acoustic variation and semantic association Over the past twenty years, evidence has accumulated that listeners store phonetically- rich memories of spoken words (Goldinger 1996, Johnson 1997; Schacter & Church, 1992). These memorized episodes are linked to various speaker characteristics, including gender (Strand & Johnson 1996, […]
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