Author Archives: Joseph Pater

Abstract for Breen talk

The Cat in the Hat: Musical and linguistic metric structure realization in child-directed poetry

Children’s nursery rhymes represent an intersection of music and language. In the current talk, I’ll describe recent work from my lab demonstrating the realization of systematic musical structure in acoustic measures of a corpus of adult productions of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat, a quintessential example of metrically-regular, rhyming children’s poetry.

First, we show that duration variation based on metric structure in the spoken corpus is similar to expressive duration variation based on metric phrasing structure in music, such that longer word (and similarly, note) durations are associated with higher positions in a metric tree structure. Second, we show that intensity variation based on a 6/8 musical meter in the spoken corpus is similar to expressive intensity variation in 6/8 meter in music performance, such that words (and notes) associated with beat 1 are produced with the greatest intensity, words (and notes) associated with beat 4 are produced with moderate intensity, and words (and notes) associated with beats 2, 3, 5, & 6 are produced with the least intensity. Finally, we show that pitch measures correspond to both metric phrasing structure and metric accent structure.

In summary, these results demonstrate the close relationship between music and language that is realized in children’s poetry. Moreover, they give us insight into the mechanisms by which adult productions of children’s books like The Cat in the Hat provide a cognitive benefit to child listeners.

Fernanda Ferreira at UMass Thursday and Friday April 25-26

Fernanda Ferreira is delivering a talk in the Five College Cognitive Science Speaker Series Thurs. April 25 at 2:45, and this year’s Freeman Lecture in Linguistics Fri. April 26th at 3:30. The CogSci talk will be aimed at a more specialist audience; the Freeman lecture is targeted more broadly. Details, and abstracts, are below.

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Getting a head in language processing: Psychollinguistic effects of pre- versus postnominal modifi

Five College Cognitive Science Speaker Series

ILC S131, 2:45 Thurs. April 25

Planning and Deciding during Language Production

Annual Freeman Lecture

ILC N151, 3:30 Fri. April 26th

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Abstract: Getting a head in language processing: Psychollinguistic effects of pre- versus postnominal modification

Languages provide speakers with structural options for expressing the same idea, and psycholinguistic investigations have focused on the basis for speakers’ selection of one form over another and the consequences of those choices for comprehension. One alternation that has received relatively little attention is the choice between prenominal versus postnominal modification (the popular candidate versus the candidate who’s popular). Work done in collaboration with John Henderson in the 1990s showed that head position modulates garden-path effects, leading us to hypothesize that syntactic and semantic phrasal roles are assigned at heads. In current work done in collaboration with Hossein Karimi, we have demonstrated that modified noun phrases are encoded more deeply than non-modified phrases, and we also provided evidence for facilitated retrieval of postmodified NPs over NPs that are premodified. These results have implications for memory based theories of language processing and for theories that emphasize discourse status and information structure in language processing.

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Abstract: Planning and Deciding during Language Production

Speakers must decide how to convert unordered thoughts and ideas into a structured sequence of linguistic forms that communicates their intended message. One solution to this linearization problem is for speakers to begin with information that is easy to access and encode, allowing them to retrieve more difficult material during articulation and minimizing the need for pauses and other disfluencies. On this view, the syntactic form of a sentence emerges as a byproduct of speakers’ attempts to accommodate the early placement of a constituent. This incremental strategy is also thought to characterize multi-utterance production, which implies that the initial utterance of a discourse will reflect easily accessed or primed content. However, evidence for this kind of incremental planning strategy during multi-utterance production is sparse. Based on a new line of research using scene description tasks, we have developed a competing theory which assumes that speakers build a detailed macro-plan for the upcoming sequence of utterances. This work shows that speakers do not begin their descriptions with information that is salient or easy, but instead start with what is most meaningful. One key innovation of this work is our application of new techniques for quantifying the spatial distribution of meaning over a scene to the challenge of explaining linearization during language production. Our results suggest that a linearization plan guides speakers’ attention during language production and determines the sequencing of utterances, in contrast to “see-say” models of speaking which assume an incremental process. Moreover, application of the same approach to single-sentence production suggests that the language production system as a whole is less incremental than has been assumed.

Dayal colloquium Friday April 12th at 3:30

Veneeta Dayal of Yale University will present “The Fine Structure of the Interrogative Left Periphery” in the GLSA Linguistics colloquium series Friday April 12th at 3:30. All are welcome!

Abstract: In this talk I explore the possibility that there are three points on the left periphery where interrogative meaning is built up, CP+WH, Force-P+Q, SAPASK:

[SAP SA0ASK [Force-P Force0+Q [CP C0+WH [TP]]]]

At CP, the +WH specification takes the TP denotation and creates a set of propositions, the semantic type for questions. At SAP, the question is anchored to the context of utterance via speaker and addressee co-ordinates. CPs are canonically what we find in complement positions, SAPs what we find in matrix questions and quotations. This two-way distinction, I would venture to say, is relatively uncontroversial or at least less radical sounding than the postulation of a three-way distinction.

I argue for a third structural position, in between CP and SAP, with a distinct semantic profile. I call this position Force-P+Q. While the term Force-P is familiar from Rizzi (1997), the characterization of this position is likely different from what has so far been assumed in the literature. I argue that Force0+Q takes a set of propositions (a question denotation) and turns it into a centered question, a question that is crucially active for someone. This allows Force-P to either feed into SAP, and be linked to a contextually provided anchor, or enter into a complementation relation with a predicate and be linked to an argument of that predicate.

The empirical justification for the three-way distinction in interrogative syntax-semantics comes from the following inter-related phenomena, which will be discussed in some detail in the course of the talk: embedding predicates, subject-aux inversion, biased questions, (polar) question particles, intonational contours, alternative vs. polar questions. In doing so, I draw on earlier collaborative work with Jane Grimshaw (Dayal and Grimshaw 2009) and Rajesh Bhatt (Bhatt and Dayal 2014 and subsequent versions), while absolving them of all responsibility for anything in this proposal that they may not have signed on to.