Winter Storm Daily Digest - 01.11.2013

Highlights from selected Special Interest Groups: From Chris Heffner, Word Segmentation "Today, the word segmentation group spent its time examining the "Possible Word Constraint", a proposed universal preference for listeners to posit word boundaries near vowels, based on the erstwhile constraint that absolutely every word in absolutely every language has a vowel in it. We also discussed a paper covering the PWC in Slovak, a language, like Croatian and Russian, where certain prepositions contain a single consonant and no vowel."
From Alison Shell, Less Is More "Based on a review article today, we talked the importance of modality or in sequence learning tasks. We also discussed types of tests that could look at language ability in the form of sentence processing, to compare to sequence learning ability in an SRT task. We plan to look at an empirical article next session to continue the conversation."

Events for Monday: 1/10/13
 1. Language Analysis Workshop With the aid of a native Zazaki speaker, participants continue to practice field methodology and learn language description techniques.
 2. Lunch: Language Analysis Workshop, second session Due to illness, there will be no faculty lunch talk today. Free lunch will still be served, in the MMH Atrium, and the Language Analysis Workshop will have an extended meeting.
 3. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Research planning groups meet for the fourth time. Please come prepared! Check the website for individual SIG pages, which contain group agendas and member contact information.
4. Professional Development Recent PhD graduate and IGERT fellow Sunyoung Lee-Ellis from the Second Language Acquisition Department discusses career alternatives for PhD graduates. Please refer to the website for precise scheduling and location information. If there is any information you would like included in a future Winter Storm daily digest, please forward this information to the WS Committee (igert-winterstorm@umd.edu). Thank you for your participation! The Winter Storm Committee