Languagescience News

HESP Happy Hour Tool Kit Series

2011-11-08T07:49:00.000-08:00

The Happy Hour Tool Kit Series continues this semester with two workshops of broad interest for language science students. Please save the dates! Refreshments will be provided and all graduate students and faculty are cordially invited. If you would like to attend, please sign up at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dDZLaVd3MFRuUDE4SFVuMXhpbjNqbnc6MQ. If you have any questions regarding these workshop, feel free to email thwu@umd.edu.

11/28 (Monday) 4:30-6:30pm
Location: Woods1130
Topic: “Basic PRAAT - Sound editing software” by Matt Winn (HESP).

12/09 (Friday) 3-5pm
Location: Woods1130
Topic: "Overview of Standardized Language Assessment Tools" by Dr. Nan Bernstein Ratner (HESP)

Please visit the following wiki page for more information on these 2 events, as well as other future ones:
(http://languagescience.umd.edu/wiki/HESP%20tool-kit%20series).

In order to have a more productive session, we recommend that you download the necessary
software/materials ahead of time, and bring your laptop to the session.
The software that we’ll be using is completely FREE and you can find the link for downloading on the wiki page under “click for more info.”

Thank you for your interest and we hope to see you at the workshops!

Te-Hsin Wu
Sarah Jane McCruden
Matt Winn
Giovanna Morini
Nan Bernstein Ratner

VL2 workshop on EEG and MEG by Wing Yee Chow and Sol Lago

2011-09-22T07:26:00.000-07:00

Wing Yee Chow and Sol Lago recently taught a two-hour workshop on EEG and MEG to a group of fourteen students in the NSF-funded Visual Language and Learning (VL2) Science of Learning Center hosted at Gallaudet University. The students came from a number universities: Gallaudet, UC Davis, Boston University, U Toronto, U New Mexico, UT Austin, Rochester, Georgia Tech, and UI Urbana-Champaign.

Language Science Day on Sept 16, 2011 - Register Now!

2011-09-02T07:37:00.001-07:00

Language Science Day is an annual student-run event celebrating language science and including all the relevant approaches to the study of language such as cognitive, computational, engineering, clinical, theoretical, philosophical, biological, and educational. In 2010 the event brought together over 120 students, researchers and faculty doubling the size of the active language science community at UMd.

This year the LSD student committee planned an afternoon of events starting with a networking lunch social that will start at noon in the Atrium room of the Adele Stamp Union. The lunch will be followed by a research fair, and a series of short presentations on language science-related opportunities for collaboration between all interested researchers on the UMD campus.

For a detailed schedule and description of event and to register your participation please visit theLanguage Science Day 2011 link.

We are looking forward to seeing you there!

New Faculty Profile: Yi Ting Huang, Hearing & Speech Sciences

2011-08-31T08:48:00.000-07:00

Yi Ting Huang is a new Assistant Professor in the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology at Harvard University in 2009 and has spent the last couple of years as a post-doctoral fellow in Cognitive Psychology at the University of North Carolina.

Yi Ting is interested nearly all things language. Her primary expertise is in development and the bulk of her work focuses on how young language learners acquire the ability to coordinate linguistic representations during real-time comprehension. She explores this question by using eye-tracking methods to examine how the moment-to-moment changes that occur during processing influence the year-to-year changes that emerge during development. She has applied this approach to study a variety of topics including word recognition, grammatical role assignments, and the semantics-pragmatics interface (scalar implicatures, scalar adjectives, discourse representations). Other questions that Yi Ting enjoys thinking about include the relationship between language and concepts, comprehension and production, and speech and reading.

Dr. Bill Idsardi's research featured in Science Magazine

2011-08-17T10:18:00.000-07:00

Dr. Bill Idsardi's research with Jeffrey Heinz (Univ. of Delaware) on whether humans learn the sentence and sound patterns of natural languages through distinct learning mechanisms appears in the article "Sentence and Word Complexity" in Science Magazine (July 15, 2011). Follow the link to read the article Science (July 15, 2011) to read the article.

Alex Drummond to post doc at Durham University, UK

2011-08-02T07:49:00.000-07:00

Alex Drummond, LING and IGERT student, is beginning a three-year postdoctoral research fellowship in the Department of Philosophy at Durham University (England). He will be working on a project with Professor Wolfram Hinzen, supported by UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Shevaun Lewis (LING) Wins ARHU Service Award

2011-06-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Shevaun Lewis, who has won the College of Arts and Humanities Service award in the category of Graduate Student, for all of the work she has done above and beyond the call of duty for the linguistics department, for the language acquisition lab, and for the executive committee of the "Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity" IGERT program.

Theo $1,000 award will be presented to Shevaun at the College Convocation on September 13, 2011 at 3:30pm at the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. In addition, the recipients will receive personal engraved plaques and their names will be added to a College plaque on display in the Dean’s office.

Erika Hussey (PSYC/NACS) awarded $1000 for IGERT poster presentation

2011-06-21T08:19:00.000-07:00

This year’s NSF-IGERT fellow poster competition (May 3-6, 2011) was for the first time held online at www.igert.org. The competition featured 135 presenters that were nominated through their individual IGERT programs. The posters were judged by a committee of faculty who volunteered their time for the job. Erika’s work on “How Exercising (Your Brain) Improves Language Use” was selected among the 24 finalist posters, and she was invited to the NSF headquarters on May 25 for the final phase of the poster competition, which included a career advancement day.

Erika’s research is centered on investigating the role of cognitive control for language processing and examines how cognitive control training generalizes to measures of language processing. Her present study was the first to demonstrate that cognitive control training may transfer to untrained language measures, suggesting that general-purpose cognitive control is a common mechanism that reinterpretation abilities also rely on. These findings have important implications for patient populations with cognitive impairments that affect language skills. Her work may also help to inform ways of determining how to offset conditions when cognitive control is depleted, like cases of cognitive-fatigue, stress, and performance-pressure.

Erika’s Poster can be viewed at: http://www.igert.org/posters2011/posters/38
The 24 finalist works can also be seen at: http://www.igert.org/posters2011/posters#/finalists/id=finalists

NSF-GRFP grant awarded to Dustin Chacon, LING

2011-04-11T07:59:00.000-07:00

Dustin Chacón, a first year student, Flagship fellow and Beinecke scholar in the Linguistics department at UMd, has been recently awarded a prestigious NSF-GRFP grant. The grant will be covering his stipend, tuition costs, and cover a bit of funding for travel costs for 3 years.

The project that Colin Phillips and he proposed was to see whether the robustness of applying grammatical coreference
constraints in parsing that have been observed in English are due to the properties of those constraints or whether they are due to the way that word order and memory mechanisms interact. He will test this by looking at correlative clause constructions in Hindi in which the same coreference constraints exist, though the relevant phrases come in reverse linear order with respect to their English counterparts.

HESP Happy Hour Tool-Kit Series

2011-04-07T09:03:00.000-07:00

The Department of Hearing & Speech Sciences is happy to announce a new series of seminars and workshops designed to spread expertise in software and research applications commonly used in language-related fields. The point of these sessions will be to spur the increased use of software which can increase the productivity of language researchers, as well as foster collaborations between scholars who stand to benefit from the mutual sharing of expertise. All workshops are open to UMD graduate students and faculty, and refreshments will be provided.

Topics will include things like:

CHAT/CLAN for language transcript analysis
PRAAT
Statistical websites and packets
Photoshop & Virtual Dub

The first workshop will be “Using CLAN: Routines & Interfaces” taking place on Tuesday (4/12) from 4-6pm in room 0135 in Lefrak Hall. Refreshments will be provided and all graduate students and faculty are cordially invited. Please send a reply to gmorini@umd.edu to confirm your attendance.

Visit the following wiki page for more information on this and other future events (http://languagescience.umd.edu/wiki/HESP%20tool-kit%20series). While it is not a requirement, we recommend that you download the necessary software ahead of time, and bring your laptop to the session. The software that we’ll be using is completely FREE and you can find the link for downloading on the wiki page under “click for more info”.

Thank you for your interest and we hope to see you on April 12th!

IGERT Student wins AAAS Poster Competition

2011-04-07T07:06:00.000-07:00

A student poster presented by Yakov Kronrod (Linguistics), featuring work by Yakov, Chang Hu (CS), Olivia Buzek (CS and Linguistics undergrad), and Alexander J. Quinn (CS), has been named the winning poster in the Math, Technology, and Engineering category at the 2011 American Association for the Advancement of Science, (AAAS) Student Poster Competition. The AAAS is an international non-profit organization dedicated to advancing science around the world. In addition to organizing membership activities, AAAS publishes the journal Science.

The poster, entitled Using Monolingual Crowds to Improve Translation, reported on work done in the context of a project on crowdsourcing and translation led by Ben Bederson and Philip Resnik, which is supported by NSF and a Google Research Award. The students will be recognized in a spring issue of Science and on the Annual Meeting web site for AAAS, in addition to receiving a cash prize and a subscription to Science.

Particular recognition goes to Yakov for his leadership in creating and presenting the poster, and to all four students for the excellent work represented here and in the project as a whole. Congratulations on this well deserved recognition!

33rd Second Language Research Forum at UMD

2010-10-25T07:30:00.000-07:00

In October, the students from the Second Language Acquisition Program hosted the 33rd Second Language Research Forum, a major annual international conference in the field of SLA. It started with a two-hour presentation by Dr. Colin Phillips, who provided an overview of recent developments in experimental and computational tools for language science, with a focus on special considerations for SLA research. The talk was followed by seven concurrent free tutorial workshops, all filled to capacity:

1. Reaction Time Studies using DMDX (Nan Jiang)
2. E-Prime Workshop for Psycholinguistics in SLA (Annie Tremblay, Sunyoung Lee-Ellis, Anna Lukyanchenko)
3. Eye-Tracking for Language using Eyelink and ASL Remote Eye Trackers (Jared Novick, Susan Teubner-Rhodes, Alan Mishler, Shayne Sloggett)
4. Neurolinguistics using Electroencephalography (EEG) and Magnetoencephalography (MEG) (Colin Phillips, Wing-Yee Chow, Shannon Barrios)
5. New Considerations for Studies of Memory & Language (Brian Dillon, Erika Hussey)
6. Working with Children (Candise Chen, Min Wang)
7. Analysis and Visualization using R (Pedro Alcocer, Ewan Dunbar)

The conference proper started with the opening plenary by Dr. Michael Long (University of Maryland), who presented an embryonic theory of instructed adult SLA. The first day of the conference was celebrated with a free Welcome Reception at Samuel Riggs IV Alumni Center, where attendees were treated to a choice of light meals and beverages. The second day of the conference saw a full day of colloquia, papers, posters, a workshop on how to get published in SLA, and another plenary talk on the topic of the L2 ultimate attainment given by Dr. Kenneth Hyltenstam (Stockholm University). In the evening, many SLRF attendees used the opportunity to socialize and network at the dinner reception, complete with a student jazz trio [provided by the UMD School of Music]. The remaining two days of the conference were filled with four colloquia, papers, posters, and two more plenary talks by Dr. William O'Grady (University of Hawaii) on language acquisition without an acquisition device, and Dr. Judith Kroll (Pennsylvania State University) on the consequences of bilingualism for cognition.
Overall, we think SLRF 2010 was a big success. The conference provided a venue for 424 faculty members and graduate students to meet, present their work, exchange and develop their research ideas. It featured 4 plenary talks, 6 colloquia, 2 workshops, 109 papers and 39 posters! Several seasoned SLRFers said this was the best SLRF they had ever attended, due mostly to the high quality of the presentations and the well-executed organization. Much of the success of the conference was due to two factors, generous financial support and a dedicated group of hard-working student organizers and volunteers. The faculty members and the Ph.D. students from the SLA Program would like to express their sincere thanks to those students and volunteers who contributed to the organization of the conference as well as to the conference sponsors: the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLC), The College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU), the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC), the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL), the NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) Program, and UMD’s Division of Research.

New Language Science Faculty: Hal Daume III, CS & LING

2010-10-25T07:23:00.000-07:00

Hal Daume III is a new Assistant Professor in Computer Science, with a joint appointment in Linguistics. He is primarily interested in the interface between natural language processing, computational linguistics and machine learning.
His work in statistical modeling spans multiple aspects of language processing, including structured prediction, Bayesian methods, domain adaptation, and linguistic typology. Recently, he has been particularly interested in methods that involve processing many (100+) languages simultaneously, using linguistic insights (particularly from typology) to constrain the space of solutions that learning algorithms try to explore. He has latent interests in document summarization, discourse theory and language evolution.

HESP to host CLAN Training Workshop

2010-10-01T10:02:00.000-07:00

On October 14, Nan Ratner, Chair of the Department of Hearing and Speech Sciences, will host a workshop on new methods that allow greatly improved efficiency in transcribing and analyzing audio and video data. The workshop will focus on recently developed enhancements to the CLAN tools offered by CHILDES, the Child Language Data Exchange system (see here for more information: http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/). CLAN is a program released by CHILDES used in multimedia data organization and analysis.

Space is limited for the October workshop, due to the already high level of interest that it has generated, but you should feel free to contact Nan Ratner at nratner@hesp.umd.edu if you are interested. The workshop will run from 4-6pm on Thursday October 14th in the Hearing & Speech Sciences graduate classroom (Lefrak 0135), and will guide participants through hands-on exercises. As an added bonus, Nan will bring wine and cheese, and additional donations of soda or snacks are welcomed.

Amy Weinberg takes position as deputy executive director at CASL

2010-09-22T17:26:00.000-07:00

Amy Weinberg, Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Linguistics, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), and the Department of Computer Science, was named as the new deputy executive director of the University of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL). Dr. Weinberg played a key role in the founding of CASL in 2003 where she served as Area Director for Technical Use from 2004-2007. She returns to CASL with an even greater wealth of experience in Language Science research, including directing efforts for the Language Cognition and Culture Center as part of her appointment in the UMD Vice President for Research's office since 2007, working as PI on the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence at Johns Hopkins from 2007-2010, and serving as co-PI for our own IGERT program on the Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity since 2008. See also: http://www.casl.umd.edu/node/1360.

Sunyoung Lee-Ellis (SLA) awarded $3000 for IGERT poster presentation

2010-09-01T17:14:00.000-07:00

At this year’s NSF-IGERT annual meeting (May 24-25, Washington DC) Sunyoung Lee-Ellis (SLA) was awarded $3000 for her poster presentation on "Why bilinguals forget or not forget what their parents told them." The poster was based on joint research studies with Shannon Hoerner (LING) and several language science faculty. The award is meant to support Sunyoung's ongoing research in the US and Korea on the linguistic and perceptual abilities of heritage language speakers.

This year’s IGERT poster competition featured one student representative from each of the roughly 130 currently active IGERT programs, spanning across areas such as ecology, nanoscience, robotics, fuel cell technology, and applied mathematics. In her presentation, Sunyoung highlighted the parts of her research that the general public could relate to and conveyed why her research should be of interest to them.

The IGERT meeting also offered Sunyoung the opportunity present to engineering students the wikis that the UMD-IGERT language science students created to enhance interdisciplinary communication. She also took part in a session on how to present your work in a 60-second 'elevator speech', and learned about emerging opportunities for digital science and science journalism. The exercise was meant to encourage students to engage in sharing research and ideas with scholars of other disciplines.

6 New faculty hires in language sciences!

2010-04-21T13:05:00.001-07:00

In addition to the historic snow storms that filled our winter, we also had an unprecedented number of job talks in different areas of language sciences. The outcome of this is that the University of Maryland made at least 6 new faculty hires in language-related areas! Given that this happened in the midst of a hiring freeze, this is another mark of the university’s strong support for language science. Fuller details of these exciting new hires will follow, but here is a quick summary:

Jordan Boyd-Graber will join the iSchool. Jordan’s research focuses on applying statistical models to natural language applications, with both engineering and cognitive focus. His PhD is from Princeton, and he is currently a postdoc at Maryland with Philip Resnik.

Hal Daume will join the Dept of Computer Science. Hal is an emerging leader in the area of multilingual NLP and machine learning. He has a PhD from USC and is currently on the faculty at the U of Utah.

Naomi Feldman will join the Dept of Linguistics. Naomi is an expert in computational psycholinguistics, and is attracting much attention for her work on modeling the learning of sound systems. She is completing her PhD at Brown U, and will be at Maryland starting in Spring ’11, when she will teach an IGERT-related course on computational modeling in language.

Ellen Lau will join the Dept of Linguistics. Ellen is an expert in the cognitive neuroscience of language, combining MEG, fMRI, ERP, and behavioral measures in her work on lexical and sentence comprehension. She received her PhD from Maryland in 2009 and is currently a postdoc at Tufts U and Harvard Medical School, where she is also investigating schizophrenia and dyslexia.

Elizabeth Redcay will be joining the Dept of Psychology. Liz is an expert in social cognitive neuroscience, with a focus on non-verbal communication, early language acquisition, and autism spectrum disorder. She has a PhD from UC San Diego and is currently a postdoc at MIT.

Bob Slevcwill be joining the Dept of Psychology and CASL. Bob’s will bring much-needed expertise in language production to our community, and his interests also include memory, aphasia, second language acquisition, and language/music relations. Bob has a PhD from UC San Diego and is currently a postdoc at Rice University.

IGERT-sponsored Symposium on learning at ISIC, Baltimore in March

2010-04-21T13:04:00.002-07:00

Each year our IGERT program organizes an interdisciplinary symposium at a leading conference in an area related to the language sciences. By bringing researchers with different methodological and theoretical perspectives together, the symposium promotes the project’s vision of sustainable interdisciplinary collaboration in language science to a broader audience. This spring Jeff Lidz and Bill Idsardi led a symposium on Statistical Inference in Infant Language Acquisition at the Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies (ISIC) in Baltimore (March 10-14, 2010). Our own Amanda Woodward (Psychology) and Nathan Fox (Human Development) were program chairs for the entire conference. The unusual feature of this symposium is that it brought cross-linguistic and computational expertise together with infancy research to address fundamental issues in language learning.
Symposium line-up:

1. How to Learn Vowels: Computational Approaches to Language Diversity
William Idsardi, Brian Dillon, Ewan Dunbar (University of Maryland)
2. From Sounds to Words: A Bayesian Approach to Modeling Word Segmentation
Sharon Goldwater (University of Edinburgh)
3. Finding Rules and Words in the Speech Stream at Year 1
Luca Bonatti (University of Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)
4. Statistical Syntactic Inference in Infancy
Jeffrey Lidz (University of Maryland)
5 Discussion
Jenny Saffran (University of Wisconsin)

Date for Everybody’s Diary: IGERT External Advisory Board, May 12-13

2010-04-21T13:04:00.001-07:00

Please mark in your diaries that the first annual meeting of the external advisory board for our IGERT program in language science will take place on Weds May 12th (evening – students) and Thurs May 13th (all day – everybody). The aim of this meeting is to synthesize what we have done and what we hope to do, and to gain feedback for us and for the university administration on the program. Broad participation from faculty and students in the advisory board visit is important. More details of the schedule for the visit will follow shortly.

The external advisory board consists of 5 distinguished figures from different areas of the language sciences: Susan Gass (Mich State, SLA), Greg Hickok (UC Irvine, Cogn Neurosci), Mitch Marcus (UPenn, Comp Ling), Masha Polinsky (Harvard, theoretical linguistics), and Mabel Rice (Kansas, atypical language development).

Faculty highlight: Alexander Williams

2010-04-21T13:03:00.001-07:00

Alexander Williams is a new Assistant Professor in the Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy. His research is mainly in verbal semantics and its relation to clausal syntax. His aim is to develop a theory of semantic composition in natural languages, and correspondingly a theory of semantic values for verbs, and his research has a strong cross-linguistic focus, in particular languages of the isolating type, including a number of different languages of China and Mongolia. Presently, Alexander is developing experiments that probe the semantic expectations of toddlers, in collaboration with Jeffrey Lidz. What relations between what a verb means and where it occurs does the infant acquiring language expect to find, if any? For example, are toddlers who hear a transitive verb X in "he X'ed it flat" predisposed to conclude that the referent of "it" gets "X'ed" (as English requires, but Igbo does not)? Alexander’s current courses include a graduate course in pragmatics, jointly with Valentine Hacquard.

Major SLA Conference at Maryland in October 14-17, 2010

2010-04-21T13:02:00.002-07:00

RECONSIDERING SLA RESEARCH: DIMENSIONS AND DIRECTIONS
University of Maryland, October 14-17

In concert with the theme Reconsidering SLA Research: Dimensions and Directions, SLRF 2010 will focus on the wide range of applied, theoretical, and experimental approaches that characterizes the current field of Second Language Acquisition. The aim of the conference is to bring together relevant theories and research methodology from various disciplines that deepen our understanding of SLA and its application to real world needs. To this end, we are soliciting colloquia, papers, and posters that investigate SLA from a variety of perspectives that add to our collective understanding of SLA in theory, research, and practice.

The plenary speakers are:

Dr. Kenneth Hyltenstam, Stockholm University
Near-native second language ultimate attainment – why not nativelike?

Dr. Judith Kroll, Pennsylvania State University
Bilinguals and second language learners: Juggling two languages in one mind and brain

Dr. Michael Long, University of Maryland
Towards a theory of instructed adult SLA

Dr. William O'Grady, University of Hawai'i
Language acquisition without an acquisition device

For more information about the conference please visit: http://www.webspace.umd.edu/SLRF2010/

The IGERT program is financially supporting this conference.

IGERT supports remodeling of SLA computer lab

2010-04-21T13:02:00.001-07:00

The IGERT program has contributed $8000 to improve a computer lab to be used for second language processing. The SLA lab is located on the basement floor of Jimenez Hall. It was renovated and expanded in the Spring and Fall of 2009 to accommodate the need of an increasing number of SLA students working on second language processing projects.

The space of the lab was doubled by including the storage room adjacent to the originally much smaller lab. The lab now consists of three enclosed testing areas, including a sound-proof booth, a waiting/meeting area, and a work area. There are four computers (two PCs and two Macs) in the three testing rooms for data collection purposes, and a computer in the work area for word processing and data analysis. All computers are connected to the Internet. There is also a printer, a couple of tables, a couple file cabinets, and plenty of chairs in the lab. E-Prime and DMDX are installed on the testing computers.

Several SLA faculty members and students use the lab on a regular basis. IGERT students interested in doing so are welcome. They should contact Nan Jiang njiang@umd.edu or Kira Gor kiragor@umd.edu for potential times and reservations.

Student highlights: Dave Kush, research trip to Sweden

2010-04-21T13:01:00.001-07:00

Dave Kush is a 2nd year graduate student in the Dept of Linguistics. Dave spent March at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden conducting experiments on syntactic constraints in Swedish, in collaboration with Prof. Elisabet Engdahl and Filippa Lindahl. Dave’s project is supported by Maryland’s NSF-IGERT program and by an NSF grant awarded to Norbert Hornstein, Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka.

Dave’s motivation for going to Sweden was not the cool air or dark evenings. He wanted to understand a puzzle that has been troubling linguists for almost 30 years. Most languages have constructions that allow words and phrases to be displaced indefinitely far from their thematic position, e.g., “Who did the website say that the department sent __ to Sweden?”. But there are many constraints on these displacements, such as a ban on displacement out of relative clauses. For example, English speakers find the following example horrible: *How much pizza did you meet a man who ate __? Linguists refer to such constraints as “island constraints”, based on the notion that these are environments that one cannot escape from. Yet Swedish speakers are reported to be rather accepting of displacements from relative clauses, a fact that undermines universalist theories of language variation and language acquisition (and it is not currently well understood in any theory). Dave’s studies in Sweden built upon preliminary findings from his work at Maryland, which showed a number of restrictions on Swedes’ liberal acceptance of island violations, and suggested to him that what appears to be a cross-linguistic anomaly may in fact be a case of surface structure ambiguity. Look out for an upcoming IGERT Lunch talk for results from Dave’s work.

Ph.D. Workshop on Dissertation Proposals

2010-03-03T06:51:00.000-08:00

Subject : Ph.D. Workshop on Dissertation Proposals
When : Friday, March 05, 2010 3:00 PM - 5:00 PM
Where : Skinner : 0200 Lecture Hall
Event Type(s) : Lecture,Meeting,Seminar

This workshop will cover the essential parts of a well-constructed proposal as well as address some issues of language and organization for the different sections.
Presenter: Christine Feak

Website: www.gradschool.umd.edu/grrd/workshops/

For more information, contact:
Lenisa Nicole Joseph
+1 301 405 4180
retention@gradschool.umd.edu
www.gradschool.umd.edu/grrd/workshops/

Language Science Faculty Recruitment

2010-01-29T09:31:00.001-08:00

The Dept of Linguistics is currently holding two faculty searches, both of which are directly related to the goals of the IGERT program and to the language science community more generally.

The first position is in Computational Psycholinguistics, a position that Dean Harris of ARHU committed to support if our IGERT proposal was successful. The position will focus on computational models of human linguistic processes (as distinct from computational models that address engineering problems). This represents an important growth area currently, and the new appointment will serve the strong demand for training in computational modeling among students from multiple departments.

The second position is in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language. The person hired will be an expert in linking psychological and neuroscientific models of language, and will add to our community's existing strengths in cognitive neuroscience of language. Resources in this area are set to become even stronger when the new Maryland Neuroimaging Center opens in 2010-2011 (more details on this to follow in a future news email).

All 6 finalists for these positions will be visiting the university for 2 days, and will be able to meet with people in multiple departments. Visits will last from the end of January until the beginning of March. Contact: Bill Idsardi, idsardi@umd.edu

New Language Science Faculty: Meredith Rowe, EDHD

2010-01-29T09:28:00.000-08:00

Meredith Rowe joined the faculty of Human Development at the University of Maryland in the fall of 2009. Her training is in developmental psychology and human development with a focus on cognitive development during early childhood. Her work is centered on understanding individual differences in children’s language development, particularly vocabulary development during this period. Specific issues she investigates include: 1) the relation between gesture and language learning, 2) the role of linguistic input in child language development (for typical and atypical populations), and 3) the complex relations between socioeconomic status, parental beliefs, parental communication with children, and children’s language and early literacy skills. Meredith Rowe is also very interested in research methods related to measuring child language development and longitudinal research methods in general.

Jeff Lidz talks to 150 students at Northwood High School

2010-01-29T09:27:00.000-08:00

On Dec 18th, 2009, Jeff Lidz visited Northwood High School in Silver Spring as part of IGERT's outreach activities. Jeff gave a lecture to 150 students from the AP-Psychology and AP-French classes about the nature of human language and how children acquire language. The lecture included examples of research conducted at Maryland as part of the CNL Laboratory's Project on Children's Language Learning. The lecture was followed by a discussion period in which students related the lecture to things they were learning in their class work.

Our outreach activities with Northwood HS will continue this spring when the AP-Psychology students will again visit the University of Maryland campus to learn about the cognitive science of language through a series of graduate-student run workshops which will give students the opportunity to engage in scientific reasoning about language and to experience first-hand the research techniques used in studying human language. A cross-departmental team of graduate students organized a similar event last year that was a real hit for the high schoolers.

If you'd like to be involved in these continuing outreach activities, please contact Csilla Kajtar (ckajtar@umd.edu) and Jeff Lidz (jlidz@umd.edu).

So-One Hwang’s Project in Collaboration with Gallaudet University

2010-01-29T09:26:00.000-08:00

So-One Hwang is currently in her 4th year as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Linguistics at UMD. She is collaborating with Dr. Gaurav Mathur and Ph.D. student Clifton Langdon at Gallaudet University to conduct experiments on the perception of American Sign Language. This project is co-sponsored by Maryland’s NSF-IGERT program and Gallaudett’s NSF Science of Learning Center on visual language.

Some provocative recent findings in spoken language perception suggest that precise temporal order of speech sounds is not so important. Speech remains surprisingly intelligible even when successive chunks of the speech sound are reversed (Saberi & Perrott, 1999, Nature). So-One and her colleagues are exploring a sign-language version of the same approach by taking videos of signers and time-reversing chunks of increasing duration. The linguistic units of ASL tend to be longer than their speech counterparts, and the team is investigating whether order-insensitivity is correspondingly extended for sign language perception.

Winter Storm, in Summary

2010-01-29T09:25:00.000-08:00

Around fifty students and faculty participated in the 2010 Winter Storm organized and run by the students of the language science IGERT program at UMd The series of short lectures, group meetings, and social activities - all designed to encourage networking among students - started on January 10 with a statistics class for R and ended on January 22 with the “I-95 Summit on Learning Sound Systems,” which brought together researchers from Maryland, Johns Hopkins, Delaware, and Penn.

The Winter Storm planning committee - composed of students from Psychology, Computer Science, Linguistics, Second Language Acquisition, and Hearing and Speech - aimed to design activities that are accessible to a diverse audience. For example, the daily Lunch Talks introduced themes and people working in various language science areas ranging from computational linguistics to the neuropsychology of language. A very well attended session was Jon Sprouse’s discussion of the challenges in finding a job and succeeding in an interdisciplinary field. Jon is a recent graduate of the Linguistics Department at UMd and he is currently an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Science Department at UC Irvine. Small teams of students met each afternoon of Winter Storm to plan novel interdisciplinary research projects. For example, “Team Ferret” brought together students from biology, computer science, and linguistics to work on using machine learning techniques to identify signatures of speech sound processing in neural recordings from ferret auditory cortex.

For details of this past Winter Storm see the Winter Wiki at http://ling.umd.edu/winterstorm2010/doku.php or the photo album at www.languagescience.umd.edu

Update: Winter Storm Schedule

2010-01-06T07:30:00.001-08:00

The schedule for this year’s Winter Storm can be found at the following web address: http://ling.umd.edu/winterstorm2010/doku.php

Please visit the page again in the following days as details regarding the locations will be gradually filled in.

Sincerely,
Csilla Kajtar
IGERT Program Coordinator

WINTER STORM - intensive training session in language science

2009-12-16T11:22:00.000-08:00

You are cordially invited to participate in Winter Storm!

Winter Storm is a FREE 2-week intensive training session in language science, covering the latest software and hardware techniques and language diversity research topics in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and computational/neural modeling.

Winter Storm takes place on campus Monday through Friday from 9-4 from January 11-22 (excluding MLK day). Daily activities include breakfast, morning seminars on hardware and software techniques, guest speaker lunch presentations, and research focus groups. Winter Storm is brought to you by U of Md's NSF-IGERT program in Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity. This is an interdisciplinary program that brings together students and faculty from Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Hearing & Speech, Human Development, Linguistics, NACS, Philosophy, Psychology, and Second Language Acquisition.

Winter storm is open to all interested participants. A full schedule will be sent out at a later date to everyone who signs up. Participants need not attend every session to participate. For more information or to sign-up, please contact Csilla Kajtar by January 1st. More information will also appear at languagescience.umd.edu.

Training course in the use of fMRI at the University of Michigan

2009-12-07T10:57:00.001-08:00

The University of Michigan offers a two-week training course in the use of fMRI that includes instruction on the motivation for using fMRI, the physics that underlies the technique, the design of experiments, the acquisition of data, the analysis of those data, and the interpretation of brain activations that result. The course is open to faculty, postdocs, and graduate students and funding is available for travel and living expenses. More information can be found at the website below which contains application information along with lecture and lab notes as well as podcasts of the lectures from the 2009 version of the course.

More Info: http://sitemaker.umich.edu/fmri.training.course/home

Pedro Alcocer - Language Research in Brazil

2009-11-25T07:25:00.000-08:00

Last August, Pedro Alcocer, third year PhD student in the Linguistics Department at UMD and second year fellow in the IGERT program, travelled to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to run experiments that would shed light on how humans use memory in real time when comprehending language. This research can tell us more about how memory is structured and how search algorithms operate over that structure.

Pedro was hosted by the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro where he worked in the labs of Profs. Aniela Improta França and Marcus Maia. During his five weeks in Rio - from August to September 2009 - he was accompanied by an undergraduate research assistant, Chris O'Brien from Michigan State University.

“Brazil was an excellent place to do this kind of research,” Pedro says, “because Brazilian Portuguese has a rather unique grammatical constraint on how it licenses null subjects that we can exploit to learn more about the structure of memory. Rio, in particular, was a good place to be because it is a center for psycholinguistic research in Brazil.”

Pedro’s trip was funded through the NFS-IGERT grant based in the Linguistics Department at UMD.

Brian Dillon and Candise Chen awarded NSF-EAPSI grants

2009-11-17T10:51:00.000-08:00

Candise Chen (Human Development) and Brian Dillon (Linguistics) were awarded the NSF’s East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes (EAPSI) award. EAPSI’s goal is to introduce U.S. graduate students to East Asia and Pacific science and engineering and foster future international collaborations. In addition to the $5,000 stipend, the award covers the round-trip ticket from the U.S. to the host country and housing in the host location. Students also benefit of a pre-departure orientation in the Washington, D.C. Area.
Candise Chen’s project was titled "Development of Prosodic Sensitivity in Young Chinese Children and Its Relation to Reading" and she spent 8 weeks in China from June to August 2009. Brian Dillon studied the "Memory Dynamics in the Processing of Chinese Anaphors" and he was hosted by the National Key Laboratory in Cognitive Neuroscience at Beijing Normal University in China.
The competition for the 2010 EAPSI award is now open; the deadline for submitting applications is December 8, 2009. More information is available at http://nsfsi.org/.

Akira Omaki (LING) Awarded NSF Grant

2009-11-17T08:28:00.000-08:00

Akira Omaki, 5th year Linguistics PhD student, won an NSF grant in the amount of $11,966 with his proposal entitled "Commitment and flexibility in the developing parser". The grant covers his travel expense to Japan to conduct sentence processing research with Japanese children and adults so that he can compare language processing profiles in speakers of Japanese and English which significantly differ in their word orders.

This is how Akira describes his research: "Everybody acknowledges the importance of input in language learning. Most existing studies on input and language development tacitly assume that children can parse the input in an adult-like fashion but have surprisingly overlooked findings from recent child parsing research that shows that children often misanalyze adults' utterances. This begs for investigations of what children actually understand with their immature parser and how it might skew the distributional properties in the input. To address this question, I am investigating 5-year-olds' wh-dependency processing, and more specifically, a) whether they process wh-dependencies 'actively' like adults and temporarily entertain incorrect analyses, b) whether they can recover from the misanalyses caused by active processing, and c) whether the 'effective' input distribution that is skewed by the immature parsers can predict the course of learning of wh-constructions more accurately than the 'true' input distribution from an adult's perspective. The research uses i) a visual-world eye-tracking study and two types of story-based comprehension paradigms (Question-after-Story, Truth Value Judgment) to examine the time course of wh-dependency processing and reanalysis in Japanese and English, as well as ii) a CHILDES corpus analysis to examine what proportion of wh-dependencies is likely to cause misanalyses."

"How we do what we want: An ideomotor approach to voluntary action." Bernhard Hommel

2009-11-16T07:46:00.000-08:00

Date: November 19, 2009

Time: 3:30-5:30

Location: BRB 1103

Bernhard Hommel (Psychology, Leiden) Title: How we do what we want: An ideomotor approach to voluntary action. Abstract: Voluntary action is anticipatory and, hence, must depend on associations between actions and their perceivable effects. This talk provides an overview of recent behavioral, electrophysiological, and imaging work from our lab on the acquisition and functional role of action-effect associations in infants, children, and adults. It shows that action effects are acquired from very early on and are still integrated spontaneously in adults. Once acquired, action effects serve to select actions by means of a network including the (developing) frontal cortex/SMA, connecting via hippocampus to the perceptual areas that code for sensory action effects. However, the impact and role of action-effect codes are regulated by the agent's processing mode and intentions.

"Teaching the Web to Speak and Be Understood," Dr. Jeffrey P. Bigham, University of Rochester

2009-11-13T08:46:00.000-08:00

Tuesday, November 17, 2009 @ 4-5 PM
Room 2116 Hornbake Building, South Wing
"Teaching the Web to Speak and Be Understood "
Dr. Jeffrey P. Bigham, University of Rochester
Tuesday, 4-5 pm, HBK 2116

Abstract:

In this talk I'll describe my efforts to teach the web speak and be understood in order to improve web access for blind people.

The web is an unparalleled information resource, but remains difficult and frustrating to use for millions of blind and low vision people. My work attempts to achieve effective personalized access for blind web users with applications that benefit all users, even sighted ones. I'll discuss the following projects to demonstrate how: (i) Usable CAPTCHAs dramatically improve the success rate of blind users on CAPTCHA problems and illustrate the potential of improving an individual interaction, (ii) TrailBlazer helps users efficiently connect interactions together by predicting what users might want to do next, and (iii) WebAnywhere adds speech output to any web page without installing new software, even on locked-down public terminals. These projects have made significant advances in web accessibility and usability for blind web users, and yielded general lessons applicable for adapting, personalizing, and delivering better content to all users.

Moving forward, I'm exploring projects that take crowdsourcing accessibility beyond the web and into the real world. Mobile phones with cameras, GPS, microphones, and other sensors are ubiquitous. How can we provide tools that let blind people use their phones to make better sense of their visual environments in the real world? I'll describe early successes in this space achieved by using these sensors to connect people with remote workers and outline a number of usability challenges that need to be addressed to fully realize this potential.

About the speaker:

Jeffrey P. Bigham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Rochester and currently a Visiting Scientist at MIT CSAIL. Jeffrey received his B.S.E degree in Computer Science in 2003 from Princeton University, and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees both in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Washington in 2005 and 2009, respectively. His work centers on web adaptation and automation, with a specific focus on how to enable blind people and others to collaboratively improve their own web experiences. For his work, he has won numerous awards, including two ASSETS Best Student Paper Awards, the Microsoft Imagine Cup Accessible Technology Award, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Award for Technology Collaboration, and Technology Review’s Top 35 Innovators Under 35 Award.

Foreign Subtitles Improve Speech Perception

2009-11-13T07:58:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily (Nov. 11, 2009) — Do you speak English as a second language well, but still have trouble understanding movies with unfamiliar accents, such as Brad Pitt's southern accent in Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds? In a new study, published in the open-access journal PLoS One, Holger Mitterer (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) and James McQueen (MPI and Radboud University Nijmegen) show how you can improve your second-language listening ability by watching the movie with subtitles -- as long as these subtitles are in the same language as the film. Subtitles in one's native language, the default in some European countries, may actually be counter-productive to learning to understand foreign speech.Mitterer and McQueen show that listeners can tune in to an unfamiliar regional accent in a foreign language. Dutch students showed improvements in their ability to recognise Scottish or Australian English after only 25 minutes of exposure to video material. English subtitling during exposure enhanced this learning effect; Dutch subtitling reduced it.

In the study, Dutch students who were unfamiliar with Scottish and Australian English watched either an episode of the Australian sitcom Kath & Kim or a shortened version of Trainspotting, which depicts a Scottish drug addict, Renton, and his friends -- with English subtitles, Dutch subtitles or no subtitles. After this exposure, participants were asked to repeat back as many words as they could from 80 audio excerpts taken from each source spoken by the main characters (Kath from Kath & Kim; Renton from Trainspotting), half of which had already been heard by the participants in the extracts and half were new to the participants (from a different Kath & Kim episode or from a part of Trainspotting that was edited out).

The researchers found that English subtitles were associated with the best performance on both previously heard and new material but although Dutch subtitles also enhanced performance on the old items, they led to a worse performance on the new materials. The participants seemed to be using the semantic (meaning-based) information in the Dutch subtitles when listening to the English speech and so the Dutch subtitles appear to have helped the participants to decipher which English words had been uttered, as seen in the improved recognition of previously heard materials. This did not, however, allow participants to retune their phonetic categories so as to improve their understanding of new utterances from the same speaker.

Listeners can use their knowledge about how words normally sound to adjust the way they perceive speech that is spoken in an unfamiliar way. This seems to happen with subtitles too. If an English word was spoken with a Scottish accent, English subtitles usually told the perceiver what that word was, and hence what its sounds were. This made it easier for the students to tune in to the accent. In contrast, the Dutch subtitles did not provide this teaching function, and, because they told the viewer what the characters in the film meant to say, the Dutch subtitles may have drawn the students' attention away from the unfamiliar speech.

These findings also have educational implications. Since foreign subtitles seem to help with adaptation to foreign speech in adults, they should perhaps be used whenever available (e.g. on a DVD) to boost listening skills during second-language learning. Moreover, since native-language subtitles interfere with this kind of learning, such subtitles in television programmes should be made optional for the viewer.

This work was funded by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften.

Journal reference:

Mitterer et al. Foreign Subtitles Help but Native-Language Subtitles Harm Foreign Speech Perception.PLoS ONE, 2009; 4 (11): e7785 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0007785

Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091110202847.htm

New Brain Findings On Dyslexic Children: Good Readers Learn From Repeating Auditory Signals, Poor Readers Do Not

2009-11-13T07:51:00.000-08:00

ScienceDaily (Nov. 12, 2009) — The vast majority of school-aged children can focus on the voice of a teacher amid the cacophony of the typical classroom thanks to a brain that automatically focuses on relevant, predictable and repeating auditory information, according to new research from Northwestern University. But for children with developmental dyslexia, the teacher's voice may get lost in the background noise of banging lockers, whispering children, playground screams and scraping chairs, the researchers say. Their study appears in the Nov. 12 issue of Neuron.

Recent scientific studies suggest that children with developmental dyslexia -- a neurological disorder affecting reading and spelling skills in 5 to 10 percent of school aged children -- have difficulties separating relevant auditory information from competing noise.

The research from Northwestern University's Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory not only confirms those findings but presents biological evidence that children who report problems hearing speech in noise also suffer from a measurable neural impairment that adversely affects their ability to make use of regularities in the sound environment.

"The ability to sharpen or fine-tune repeating elements is crucial to hearing speech in noise because it allows for superior 'tagging' of voice pitch, an important cue in picking out a particular voice within background noise," said Nina Kraus, Hugh Knowles Professor of Communication Sciences and Neurobiology and director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.

In the article "Context-dependent encoding in the human auditory brainstem relates to hearing speech-in-noise: Implications for developmental dyslexia," Kraus and co-investigators Bharath Chandrasekaran, Jane Hornickel, Erika Skoe and Trent Nicol demonstrate that the remarkable ability of the brain to tune into relevant aspects in the soundscape is carried out by an adaptive auditory system that continuously changes its activity based on the demands of context.

Good and poor readers were asked to watch a video while the speech sound "da" was presented to them through an earphone in two different sessions during which the brain's response to these sounds was continuously measured.

In the first session, "da" was repeated over and over and over again (in what the researchers call a repetitive context). In the second, "da" was presented randomly amid other speech sounds (in what the researchers call a variable context). In an additional session, the researchers performed behavioral tests in which the children were asked to repeat sentences that were presented to them amid increasing degrees of noise.

"Even though the children's attention was focused on a movie, the auditory system of the good readers 'tuned in' to the repeatedly presented speech sound context and sharpened the sound's encoding. In contrast, poor readers did not show an improvement in encoding with repetition," said Chandrasekaran, lead author of the study. "We also found that children who had an adaptive auditory system performed better on the behavioral tests that required them to perceive speech in noisy backgrounds."

The study suggests that in addition to conventional reading and spelling based interventions, poor readers who have difficulties processing information in noisy backgrounds could benefit from the employment of relatively simple strategies, such as placing the child in front of the teacher or using wireless technologies to enhance the sound of a teacher's voice for an individual student.

Interestingly, the researchers found that dyslexic children showed enhanced brain activity in the variable condition. This may enable dyslexic children to represent their sensory environment in a broader and arguably more creative manner, although at the cost of the ability to exclude irrelevant signals (e.g. noise).

"The study brings us closer to understanding sensory processing in children who experience difficulty excluding irrelevant noise. It provides an objective index that can help in the assessment of children with reading problems," Kraus says.

For nearly two decades, Kraus has been trying to determine why some children with good hearing have difficulties learning to read and spell while others do not. Early in her work, because the deficits she was exploring related to the complex processes of reading and writing, Kraus studied how the cortex -- the part of the brain responsible for thinking --encoded sounds. She and her colleagues now understand that problems associated with the encoding of sound also can occur in lower perceptual structures.

Adapted from materials provided by Northwestern University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091111123600.htm

Learning Correspondence Representations for Natural Language Processing, John Blitzer

2009-11-05T10:48:00.001-08:00

John Blitzer, postdoc at University of California, Berkeley, will be giving a talk
on Friday, November 6, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. in room 2120 AVW.

TITLE:

Learning Correspondence Representations for Natural Language Processing

ABSTRACT: The key to creating scalable, robust natural language
processing (NLP) systems is to exploit correspondences between known
and unknown linguistic structure. Natural language processing has
experienced tremendous success over the past two decades, but our most
successful systems are still limited to the domains and languages
where we have large amounts of hand-annotated data. Unfortunately,
these domains and languages represent a tiny portion of the total
linguistic data in the world. No matter the task, we always encounter
unknown linguistic features like words and syntactic constituents that
we have never observed before when estimating our models. This talk
is about linking these linguistic features to one another through
correspondence representations.

The first part describes a technique to learn lexical correspondences
for domain adaptation of sentiment analysis systems. These systems
predict the general attitude of an essay toward a particular topic.
In this case, words which are highly predictive in one domain may not
be present in another. We show how to build a correspondence
representation between words in different domains using projections to
low-dimensional, real-valued spaces. Unknown words are projected onto
this representation and related directly to known features via
Euclidean distance. The correspondence representation allows us to
train significantly more robust models in new domains, and we achieve
a 40% relative reduction in error due to adaptation over a
state-of-the-art system.

The second part describes a technique to learn syntactic
correspondences between languages for machine translation. Syntactic
machine translation models exploit syntactic correspondences to
translate grammatical structures (e.g. subjects, verbs, and objects)
from one language to another. Given pairs of sentences which are
translations of one another, we build a latent correspondence grammar
which links grammatical structures in one language to grammatical
structures in another. The syntactic correspondences induced by our
grammar significantly improve a state-of-the-art Chinese-English
machine translation system.

BIO: John Blitzer is a postdoctoral fellow in the computer science
department at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Dan
Klein. He completed his PhD in computer science at the University of
Pennsylvania under Fernando Pereira, and in 2008 spent 6 months as a
visiting researcher in the natural language computing group at
Microsoft Research Asia. John's research focuses on applications of
machine learning to natural language. In particular, he is interested
in exploiting unlabeled data and other sources of side information to
improve supervised models. He has applied these techniques to
tagging, parsing, entity recognition, web search, and machine
translation. More info on John's research interests is available at
http://john.blitzer.com.

NACS Colloquium Series: Dr. Sarah Bottjer

2009-11-05T06:48:00.000-08:00

Subject : NACS Colloquium Series: Dr. Sarah Bottjer

When : Friday, November 06, 2009 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Where : 1103 Bioscience Research Building

Event Type(s) : Colloquium

"Neural Substrates for Vocal Learning during the Sensitive Period in Songbirds"

Sarah Bottjer, Ph.D.

Professor of Neurobiology

University of Southern California

Website: www.nacs.umd.edu/calendar/index.cfm

For more information, contact:

Pam Komarek

Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program

+1 301 405 8910

pkomarek@umd.edu

www.nacs.umd.edu

Thursday, Nov 5: Cognitive Science Colloquium

2009-11-05T06:47:00.000-08:00

Subject : Cognitive Science Colloquium

When : Thursday, November 05, 2009 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM

Where : Bioscience Research Building : 1103

Event Type(s) : Colloquium

Judy DeLoache (Psychology, Virginia)

Title: Becoming Symbol-Minded

Abstract: Every society has a wealth of symbols and symbol systems that support cognition and communication, and all children must master a variety of symbolic artifacts to participate fully in their society. My research shows that in the course of learning to use various symbolic representations—including pictures, models, and replica objects—infants and young children experience a surprising amount of difficulty. They often fail to note the distinction between symbols and their referents, behaving toward symbolic artifacts as if they were what they stand for. The extended process of becoming symbol-minded begins in the first year of life, as infants start to learn about the nature of pictures: Through experience, they discover both what pictures are and what they are not. Slightly older children have substantial difficulty understanding and using scale models, but rapidly come to appreciate the nature and use of this type of symbol. At the same time, very young children make dramatic errors in which they try to interact with a miniature representational artifact as if it were its larger counterpart. Mastery of these different types of symbolic objects involves developmental progress in multiple domains.

Thursday of next week: discussion of two papers by Bernhard Hommel (Psychology, Leiden), which are accessible here:
http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/cog-sci.htm

For more information, contact:

Peter M. Carruthers

+1 301 405 5705

pcarruth@umd.edu

2009 Language Fair - PG Room, Stamp Student Union

2009-11-03T06:32:00.000-08:00

Subject : 2009 Language Fair--PG Room, Stamp Student Union

When : Monday, November 02, 2009 10:00 AM - 2:30 PM

Where : Stamp Student Union : Prince George's Room

Event Type(s) : Special Event

2009 Language Career Fair

Tuesday, November 03, 2009 * 10:00AM - 02:00PM

Location: Prince George's Room, Stamp Student Union (Location Change)

University of Maryland's 2009 Language Career Fair, co-sponsored by The University of Maryland's University Career Center and The President's Promise and The School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures. This career fair is an excellent opportunity to for University of Maryland undergraduate and graduate students seeking full-time, part-time, and internship positions in a variety of fields that value language skills to network with a diverse range of organizations. Participating organizations will be able to share information with students about their programs, organizations and potential careers. Student participants will come from all majors and/or minors and are eager to utilize their language skills in a variety of industries. This event is open to all UMD students

Website: www.careercenter.umd.edu

For more information, contact:

Stacey Hazel Brown

University Career Center and The President's Promise

+1 301 314 7241

sbrown12@umd.edu

www.careercenter.umd.edu

Lecture: "Principle C in Adult and Child Thai," Kamil Ud Deen of the University of Hawaii at Manoa

2009-11-02T06:33:00.000-08:00

We're pleased to announce that this week's speaker in our 2009-2010 colloquium series will be Kamil Ud Deen of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, with a talk entitled "Principle C in Adult and Child Thai" (abstract follows).

Due to the large number of people leaving to attend BUCLD this coming weekend (including the speaker), the talk will be at a special time:

Wednesday, Nov 4, 12:00 PM

1108 Marie Mount Hall

We hope to see you there! --Colloquium Committee

Principle C in Adult and Child Thai

Children in a wide range of languages show evidence of Principle C at the earliest testable ages (Crain & McKee, 1985; Kazanina & Phillips, 2001; Lukyanenko et.al., 2008; amongst many others). This has been taken as evidence that Principle C is a universal, innate principle of grammar (Crain, 1991). However, Thai is a language in which Principle C appears to be violable, at least in certain contexts. This could be taken as initial evidence that Principle C is in fact not part of Universal Grammar, but is learned from experience (or in the case of Thai, not learned because the experience does not contain Principle C). Moreover, if Principle C is learned from the input, then we predict that Thai children will never show evidence of Principle C, and will thus pattern like Thai adults from the earliest testable ages. But if Principle C is part of UG, Thai children should initially show evidence of Principle C in contexts that adults do not, only to 'unlearn' this over time. In this talk, I first describe the contexts in which Principle C applies in adult Thai. I then show that Thai children overgeneralize Principle C: they disallow a coindexed reading in contexts where adults allow it. This shows that Principle C is innately specified, and fully available to Thai children at early ages.

Thai adults apply Principle C in contexts where the relevant R- expressions are full DPs (modified by a classifier or a demonstrative), but not when the relevant R-expressions are unmodified by classifiers/demonstratives (Larson, 2005), as in (1).

(1)

DP: [Elephant CL big]_i said that [elephant CL big]_*i / j won the

Competition

Non-DP: Elephant_i said that elephant_i won the competition

We tested 66 Thai children (aged 4;5-6;2) on two Truth Value Judgment Tasks (Crain & McKee, 1985), and the results reveal that (i) Thai children, like Thai adults, adhere to Principle C in the DP condition, rejecting a co-indexed reading when the two R-expressions are full DPs; (ii) Thai children, *unlike* Thai adults, also adhere to Principle C in the non-DP context, rejecting the coindexed reading in contexts that adults accept it. Thus Thai children show evidence of Principle C not only at the earliest testable ages, but in contexts in which Principle C does not apply in the adult language. Taken together, these facts provide strong and novel evidence that Principle C is specified by Universal Grammar and is available to children even in conditions in which the input is variable and potentially inconsistent with Principle C.

Phonology & General Linguistics: Assistant Professor, University of Missouri - Columbia

2009-11-02T06:29:00.000-08:00

University of Missouri - Columbia
Phonology and General Linguistics: Assistant Professor, University of Missouri - Columbia

Rank: Assistant Professor
Deadline: Until filled
Ling Fields: General Linguistics - Phonology
Department: English Department

Job Description: University of Missouri: The English Department at MU seeks an assistant professor (tenure track) in linguistics with a specialization in phonology. PhD in linguistics or related field preferred.
Appointment begins 15 August 2010.

The successful candidate will complete a three-member faculty team in the English department, teaching courses that contribute to an interdisciplinary major in linguistics and to a linguistics component of our English degrees.

MU is the state's flagship university. We offer generous research leaves for faculty, and the standard teaching schedule is two courses per semester. Send letter of application and cv to Patricia Okker at the application address listed below. No electronic applications will be accepted.
Preference given to applications received by 2 November. Applications will be acknowledged by department letter. The University of Missouri is an EOE/AA/ADA employer.

Application Address:
Patricia Okker, Professor and Chair
University of Missouri - Columbia
Department of English
Columbia, MO 65211
USA

Contact information:
Sharon Black
blacksa@missouri.edu
Phone: 573-882-6066

Structure and Knowledge in Natural Language Processing

2009-10-29T08:07:00.000-07:00

Harold Daume III
Assistant Professor at University of Utah will be giving a talk on Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 10:00 a.m. in room 2460.

Title: Structure and Knowledge in Natural Language Processing

Abstract:
Human language exhibits complex structure. To be successful, machine learning approaches to language-related problems must be able to take advantage of this structure. I will discuss several investigations into the relationship between structure and learning, which have led to some surprising conclusions about the role that structure plays in language processing. From there, I will consider the question of: where does this structure come from. By taking insights from linguistic typology, I will show that very simple typological information can lead to significant increases in system performance for some simple syntactic problems. Moreover, I will show how this typological information can be mined from raw data.

(This talk includes joint work with Dan Klein, John Langford, Percy Liang, Daniel Marcu, and some of my students: Arvind Agarwal, Adam Teichert and Piyush Rai.)

Cognitive Science Colloquium

2009-10-29T08:05:00.000-07:00

There will be a discussion of two recent papers by Judy DeLoache at 3.30 pm tomorrow, Thursday October 29, in Bioscience Research Building 1103.

The papers can be accessed from the discussion link on the Colloquium website at:

http://www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/cog-sci.htm

Judy DeLoache will then visit the colloquium next week. Those wishing to meet with her should email <pcarruth@umd.edu>

Peter Carruthers

www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/

Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of Maryland

1122B Skinner Building, College Park, MD 20742, USA

Tel. (office): 301 405 5705

Tel. (home): 301 270 5107

The biological foundations of language: Insights from sign language

2009-10-27T06:37:00.000-07:00

Subject: The Annual Blackwell/Maryland Lectures Series
When: Wednesday, November 11, 2009 3:00 PM - Friday, November 13, 2009 12:00 PM
Where: Marie Mount Hall, Maryland Room
Event Type(s) : Lecture

Series title: "The biological foundations of language: Insights from sign language"

Signed languages provide a powerful tool for investigating the nature of human language and language processing, the relation between cognition and language, and the neural organization for language.

Lecture 1 Nov. 11 from 3 to 6pm in the Md room
Sign language and the brain

Lecture 2 Nov. 12 from 3 to 6pm in the Md room
Speaking vs. signing: How the biology of linguistic expression affects language processing

Lecture 3 Nov. 13, 2009 from 10am to 12pm in the Md room
Bimodal bilingualism

FFI see website: www.ling.umd.edu/

Website: www.ling.umd.edu

For more information, contact:
Kathleen M. Faulkingham
Linguistics Dept.
+1 301 405 7002
kathif@umd.edu
www.ling.umd.edu

Ivano Caponigro colloquium

2009-10-26T06:21:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce that Ivano Caponigro from UCSD is giving a colloquium talk this Friday 10/30 at 2PM in MMH1304. The title of the talk is 'Ask, and Tell as Well: Question-Answer Clauses in American Sign Language'.

Abstract:

A construction is found in American Sign Language that we call a Question-Answer Clause. It is made of two parts: the first part looks like an interrogative clause conveying a question, while the second part resembles a declarative clause that can be used to answer that question. The very same signer has to sign both, and the entire construction is interpreted as truth-conditionally equivalent to a declarative sentence. In this talk, we discuss these and other properties of Question-Answer Clauses and provide a syntactic, semantic and pragmatic account. In particular, we argue that Question-Answer Clauses are copular clauses consisting of a silent copula of identity connecting an interrogative clause in the precopular position with a declarative clause in the postcopular position. Pragmatically, they instantiate a topic/comment structure, with the first part expressing a sub-question under discussion and the second part expressing the answer to that sub-question. We discuss broader implications of our analysis for the Question Under Discussion Theory of discourse-structuring, for a popular analysis of pseudoclefts in spoken languages, and for recent proposals about the existence of exhaustivity operators in the grammar and the consequences for the syntax/semantics/pragmatics interface.

IGERT Lunch Talk: Emotionally arousing language: The effects of emotional interference in L1 and L2

2009-10-23T07:23:00.000-07:00

When: October 29, 12pm - 1pm

Where: 1108B Marie Mount Hall, Linguistics Department

Susan Teubner-Rhodes will present: "Emotionally arousing language: The effects of emotional interference in L1 and L2."

She will be discussing the time course of the Emotional Stroop task and disparate effects of top down control on the processing of emotional language in a native versus a second language.

Susan is a second year PhD student in the Psychology department, the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at UMD.

Mark Liberman: "A New Golden Age of Phonetics"

2009-10-23T06:21:00.000-07:00

CENTER FOR LANGUAGE AND SPEECH PROCESSING
Fall 2009 Seminar Series

Mark Liberman, "A New Golden Age of Phonetics"
University of Pennsylvania

Tuesday, October 27, 2009, 4:30 p.m.
Computational Science and Engineering Building, room B17

From the perspective of a linguist, today's vast archives of digital text and speech, along with new analysis techniques from language engineering, look like a wonderful new scientific instrument, a modern equivalent of the 17th-century invention of the telescope and microscope. We can now observe linguistic patterns in space, time, and cultural context, on a scale three to five orders of magnitude greater than in the past, and simultaneously in much greater detail than before. Scientific use of these new instruments remains mainly potential, especially in phonetics and related disciplines, but the next decade is likely to be a new "golden age" of research. This talk will discuss some of the barriers to be overcome, present some successful examples, and speculate about future directions.

BIOGRAPHY

Biographical information for Mark Liberman is available from http://ling.upenn.edu/~myl <http://ling.upenn.edu/%7Emyl> .

DIRECTIONS: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/about/directions
UPCOMING TALKS: http://www.clsp.jhu.edu/seminars

Nov 3 Mirella Lapata (U of Edinburgh): Vector-based Models of Semantic Composition
Nov 10 Oren Etzioni (U of Washington): We KnowItAll: Lessons from a Quarter Century of Web Extraction Research

Cognitive Science Colloquium: Evaluating Faces on Social Dimensions

2009-10-22T06:12:00.000-07:00

Subject : Cognitive Science Colloquium

When : Thursday, October 22, 2009 3:30 PM - 5:30 PM

Where : Bioscience Research Building : 1103

Event Type(s) : Colloquium

Today: Alexander Todorov (Psychology, Princeton), "Evaluating Faces on Social Dimensions".

For an abstract of the talk, see the Colloquium website.

Next Thursday (same time and place): a discussion of two articles by Judy Deloache (Psychology, Virginia), who visits the colloquium the week after.

Website: www.philosophy.umd.edu/Faculty/pcarruthers/cog-sci.htm

For more information, contact:

Peter M. Carruthers

+1 301 405 5705

pcarruth@umd.edu

Lunch talk: "Machine learning of phonological categories

2009-10-20T07:49:00.000-07:00

When: Thursday, October 22nd

Where: Marie Mount Hall, room 1108B

Lunch will be provided.

Brian Dillon, Ewan Dunbar, and Bill Idsardi will discuss machine learning of phonological categories.

PhD Completion Project: Teaching Portfolios

2009-10-20T06:24:00.000-07:00

The Graduate School at University of Maryland presents:

PhD Completion Project Workshops: Teaching Portfolios

Spencer Benson,
Director
Center for Teaching Excellence

David Eubanks
Assistant Director
Center for Teaching Excellence

Friday, October 16, 2009
Lecture Hall 0200, Skinner Building

3:00 to 5:00 p.m.

This workshop will provide information about developing a professional teaching portfolio. Topics will include creating your statements of teaching philosophy and teaching experience and items to incorporate into the portfolio.
For registration and additional information, please visit: http://www.gradschool.umd.edu/grrd/workshops. <http://www.gradschool.umd.edu/grrd/workshops>

Questions: 301.405.4180 or retention@gradschool.umd.edu

Talk:Word order development in English and Norwegian: Micro-cues, information structure and economy

2009-10-20T06:18:00.000-07:00

On November 9, at 11:30, in the upstairs conference room of the Linguistics Department (Marie Mount Hall) professor of linguistics and director of CASTL at the University of Tromsø, Marit Westergaard, will be giving a talk. Lunch will be provided. The abstract is included below.

Word order development in English and Norwegian: Micro-cues, information structure and economy

Marit Westergaard
University of Tromsø – CASTL

Abstract
This paper considers the loss of verb second (V2) word order in the history of English and present-day Norwegian dialects with a particular focus on the question why it survives in certain contexts. I argue against a parametric approach to V2 word order and classify both English and Norwegian as mixed V2 grammars, i.e. grammars which require V2 in some contexts and non-V2 in others. Within an approach to language acquisition and change that is based on the existence of micro-cues in children’s I-language grammars, some acquisition data are considered, showing that mixed V2 systems are easily learnable. Discussing some historical data from Old and Middle English (OE/ME) as well as synchronic variation in Norwegian, I argue that the choice between the two word orders is due to a productive syntactic rule which is sensitive to information structure. The loss of this rule as well as the survival of certain remnant cases are discussed in relation to processes in first language acquisition.

First post

2009-10-19T09:37:00.000-07:00

This is the first and test post to the Languagescience News blog.