Brian Dillon (UMass Linguistics) will be presenting Which noun phrases is this verb supposed to agree with… and when? in the Cognitive Brown Bag series in Tobin 521 at noon Wednesday, February 11. Everyone is welcome – the abstract is below.

Abstract: The study of agreement constraints has yielded much insight into the organization of grammatical knowledge, within and across languages. In a parallel fashion, the study of agreement production and comprehension have provided key data in the development of theories of language production and comprehension. In this talk I present work at the intersection of these two research traditions. I present the results of experimental research (joint work with Adrian Staub, Charles Clifton Jr, and Josh Levy) that suggests that the grammar of many American English speakers is variable: in certain syntactic configurations, more than one NP is permitted to control agreement (Kimball & Aissen, 1971). However, our work suggests that this variability is not random, and in particular, optional agreement processes are constrained by the nature of the parser. We propose that variable agreement choices arise in part as a function of how the parser stores syntactic material in working memory during the incremental production of syntactic structures.

Gillian Gallagher of NYU will be giving a job talk titled Natural Classes in Phonotactic Learning (abstract below) in the Linguistics department on Friday, 20 February at 3:30 pm in ILC N400. All are welcome to attend.

Natural classes in phonotactic learning

The core representational unit in phonology is the feature, used to
define contrasts between sound categories (/i/ and /e/ are
distinguished by [±high]) and to pick out classes of sounds that
pattern together in the phonology ([+high] vowels may be restricted
from final position in some languages). Traditionally, phonological
features are thought to bear a direct relation to phonetic properties
(Jakobson, Fant & Halle 1952; Chomsky & Halle 1968). Under more recent
proposals, though, features are labels for phonologically active
classes that may bear a loose or no relation to the phonetics of the
sounds in question (Mielke 2008). In this talk, I present evidence
that phonetics plays a direct role in the natural classes used in the
phonological grammar.

The cooccurrence phonotactics of Quechua provide evidence for natural
classes grouping aspirated stops with the glottal fricative [h], and
grouping ejective stops with the glottal stop [?]. In addition to
being phonologically active, both of these classes are phonetically
definable based on articulatory properties of the glottis: [spread
glottis] picks out aspirates and [h], [constricted glottis] picks out
ejectives and [?]. Despite the phonological and phonetic support, two
nonce word tasks fail to find evidence for these natural classes in
speakers’ grammars. Instead, aspirate and ejective stops seem to be
targeted by the phonotactics to the exclusion of their glottal
counterparts. It is proposed that the preference for these smaller
classes of laryngeally marked stops is phonetically based, deriving
from the salience of the acoustic properties unique to stops.

Ari Kobren of the UMass CS department will be speaking in the Machine Learning and Friends lunch in CS 150 on Thursday, 19 February at 12:30 pm. Everyone is welcome.

The Department of Linguistics is currently conducting a search for a phonologist, and the campus visits have now been arranged. All of the candidates have interdisciplinary interests. Like all Linguistics colloquia, the talks will be held Fridays in ILC N-400, will be announced each week in this newsletter, and all are very much welcome. If you would like to meet with one of the candidates, please contact Joe Pater.

Gillian Gallagher (NYU): 19-20 February
Kie Zuraw (UCLA): 27-28 February
Eric Bakovic (UCSD): 5-6 March
Gaja Jarosz (Yale): 12-13 March

Patrick Sadil (lab manager of Rosie Cowell’s Computational Memory and Perception Lab) will be presenting Visual Recollection in the Cognitive Brown Bag series in Tobin 521 at noon Wednesday, February 11. Everyone is welcome – the abstract is below.

Abstract: It is widely agreed that two processes – ‘recollection’ and ‘familiarity’ – contribute to performance on episodic recognition. Furthermore, these processes have been related to separate brain structures within MTL (e.g., Brown and Aggleton, 2001). However, we and others have proposed that both processes are carried out by multiple MTL sub-regions (Cowell et al., 2010; Diana et al. 2007) and what determines engagement of a given MTL region by either recollection or familiarity is the representational content of the memory (e.g., item/context/associations or spatial information). The Representational-Hierarchical (RH) view (Cowell et al. 2010) makes a novel prediction: recollection is a pattern completion process that may be computed by any brain region containing representations that could be used in the service of memory. We tested this prediction as applied to different kinds of visual representations (object, scenes, and object in scenes). For instance, if a subject encodes a visual object at study and is cued with part of the object at test, the RH view predicts that a pattern-completion process of recollecting the object (generating the whole from the part) should be carried out in object-representing regions (e.g., perirhinal cortex) without requiring hippocampal involvement. Behaviorally, this would amount to recollection in a non-associative memory task. We examined the behavioral effects of visual pattern completion using the process dissociation procedure (PDP) of Jacoby (1991). Following study, subjects were presented with a part of the studied item (an object part, a scene part, or an object that had been embedded in a scene): a visual analog of the word-stem completion task. They named the studied object or scene either by using (inclusion) or disallowing (exclusion) their memory of the study list. To avoid well-known aggregation biases with this procedure, we used the Bayesian hierarchical model of Rouder et al. (2008) to measure recollection and familiarity. Selective influence of an experimental manipulation was used to validate the use of the PDP; we found that recollection was greater for objects studied twice rather than once, whereas familiarity was unaffected by study frequency. These results provide evidence of visual recollection for objects. Future work will use these stimuli in an fMRI experiment to determine the brain locus of visual recollection for different kinds of visual stimuli.

Scott Linderman of Harvard University, who works with Leslie Valiant on computational neuroscience and machine learning, will be presenting in the Machine Learning and Friends Lunch in CS150 on February 12 at 12:30 pm. Everyone is welcome.

The schedule for this semester’s Machine Learning and Friends series, held Thursdays at 12:30 in CS150, can be found at http://people.cs.umass.edu/~mlfriend/pmwiki/pmwiki.php. The first talk is Feb. 12th, by Scott Linderman of Harvard, who works on computational neuroscience and machine learning with Leslie Valiant.

The schedule for this semester’s Cognitive Brown Bag series (chaired by Jeff Starns), held at noon in Tobin 521, has been announced.

2/4 : Mara Breen
2/11 : Patrick Sadil
2/18 : Brian Dillon
2/25 : Greg Cox (Syracuse postdoc)
3/4 : David Ross
3/11 :
3/25 : Will Hopper
4/1 : Josh Levy
4/8 : Tina Chen
4/15 : Ben Zobel
4/29 : 1st year cog psych projects

Julie Legate of the University of Pennsylvania will present “Restrictive Phi in a Partial Typology of Noncanonical Passives” in the Department of Linguistics colloquium series in ILC N400 Friday at 3:30. An abstract is below.

Abstract: In this talk, I investigate the syntactic structure of noncanonical
passives, focusing on the role played by phi-features that restrict rather
than saturate the external argument position.  Building on previous work by
myself and others, I show that voice is encoded in a functional projection,
VoiceP, which is distinct from, and higher than, vP.  I demonstrate that
microvariations in the properties of VoiceP and in the location of
restrictive phi-features explain a wide range of noncanonical passives,
including agent-agreeing passives, restricted agent passives, accusative
object passives, impersonals, and object voice. The analysis draws on data
from a typologically diverse set of languages.

From Lisa Selkirk: Pioneering phonologist and pioneer in the study of the syntactic conditioning of tonal and segmental phenomena in the sentence in Bantu languages, Chuck Kisseberth will give a talk on Prosody, Phonological Phrasing, and Focus in Chimiini next Wednesday in Kristine Yu’s Phonological Theory class in Room N-458 in the ILC.  For more information about Kisseberth, please consult http://www.linguistics.illinois.edu/people/ckissebe.

In order to provide a normal length time slot for a talk of this sort, it will get an early start at 12:15 (instead of 12:20). The main presentation will last roughly an hour, until 1:15, and there will be a half an hour for discussion, ending at roughly 1:45.  Given the constraints of normal class schedules and the unusual time slot, it’s understandable that people may have to leave during the discussion session after the talk. Feel free to bring your lunch to the talk.