The 26th Language Lunch
Date: 2011-02-04
Location: G.07 Informatics Forum
Tracking Social Change through Sound Change
Lauren,Hall-Lew; LEL; Lauren.Hall-Lew@ed.ac.uk
English vowel production is undergoing a shift in California (Eckert 2008), and one of the most robust aspects of the shift is the merger between the vowels in LOT and THOUGHT (DeCamp 1953). While this ‘low-back merger’ is quite advanced for much of the Western United States, the distinction is still maintained in San Francisco, California (Labov, Ash, & Boberg 2006). The present paper analyzes the LOT/THOUGHT merger in interview data from a stratified sample of 29 speakers from one San Francisco neighborhood. The results show that the population as a whole is moving in apparent time toward complete merger, while ethnographic analysis further suggests that the surprising, continued maintenance of the distinction among some individuals can be understood with respect to shifting language ideologies and recent social change. Specifically, I argue that the maintenance of the low back vowel distinction, and specifically a raised production of the THOUGHT vowel, has become reimagined as a resource for constructing a more traditional neighborhood identity, while production of the merger, or a lowered production of THOUGHT, aligns a speaker with an emerging linguistic identity that is aligned with broader regional norms. Sociolinguistic research has demonstrated a renewed interest in the meanings of linguistic variables as used in day-to-day life (Eckert 2008b), and I argue here that these meanings can provide insight on the progression of sound change in progress.
Probabilistic Treatment for Syntactic Gaps in Analytic Language Parsing
Prachya,Boonkwan; ILCC; P.Boonkwan@sms.ed.ac.uk
This paper presents a syntax-based framework for gap resolution in analytic languages. CCG, reputable for dealing with deletion under coordination, is extended with a memory mechanism similar to the slot-and-filler mechanism, resulting in a wider coverage of syntactic gaps patterns. Though our grammar formalism is more expressive than the canonical CCG, its generative power is bounded by Partially Linear Indexed Grammar. Despite the spurious ambiguity originated from the memory mechanism, we also show that its probabilistic parsing is feasible by using the dual decomposition algorithm.
Bilingual Inhibitory Control is Affected by Semantic Relatedness in the Bilingual Dichotic Listening Task
Takayuki,Miura; Psychology; t.miura@sms.ed.ac.uk
Joris,Van de Cavey; PPLS; joris.vandecavey@ugent.be
Robert,Logie; Psychology; rlogie@staffmail.ed.ac.uk
Antonella,Sorace; LEL; antonella@ling.ed.ac.uk
Bilinguals have shown their cognitive control advantages in suppressing irrelevant information when they are given both visual and auditory stimuli (e.g., Bialystok, 2009; Green, 1998; Green & Bavelier, 2003; Rogers, Lister, Febo, Besting, & Abrams, 2006) and they are seen in tasks calling for inhibition of task-irrelevant cues (Bialystok, 2001). As for auditory attentional control in bilinguals, it has been investigated with phonologically relevant, but semantically meaningless consonant-vowel syllables in the dichotic listening paradigm (e.g., Hugdahl, Westerhausen, Alho, Medvedev, Laine, & Hamalainen, 2009; Soveri, Laine, Hamalainen, & Hugdahl, 2010), which does not necessarily give an implication for language inhibition among bilinguals when they process meaningful spoken messages. Cherry (1953, 1954) and Broadbent (1958) found in the dichotic listening task that the more physically different (e.g., speaker gender; voice intensity; speaker location) the unattended message is from the attended one, the easier it is to maintain attention to the attended channel. As for bilinguals, it has not been investigated how they sustain attention to the relevant auditory information (e.g., L1) while inhibiting the irrelevant one (e.g., L2), in a real-life situation where it is rather common that they interact with each other in a bilingual language mode in that they are communicating with (or listening to) bilinguals who share their two (or more) languages and language mixing may take place (Grosjean, 2008, p. 251). We gave the participants more direct and abrupt interference, i.e., the bilingual dichotic listening task (Miura, Pickering, Logie, & Sorace, 2010), to demonstrate more straightforward evidence of language inhibition and suppression among bilinguals and found that bilingual listeners are able to inhibit unattended language regardless of its semantic relatedness, particularly when the messages are spoken in different languages. Furthermore, it appears that bilinguals can notice whether what they hear in the unattended channel is semantically related to what they hear in the attended channel when they hear the same language in both channels. Our future research will investigate how bilingual listeners filter out auditory information from the unattended channel.
Mutual Exclusivity in the Naming Game
Sean,Roberts; LEL; s.g.roberts@sms.ed.ac.uk
The Naming Game looks at how agents in a population converge on a shared system for referring to continuous stimuli (Steels, 2005; Nowak & Krakauer, 1999). These models assume that a mutual exclusivity bias is necessary for establishing a shared lexicon. However, I show that communicative success is still achieved without this bias. Monolingual assumptions may obscure differences in the evolutionary dynamics of languages in monolingual and bilingual societies.
