16 March 2015

Presley Pizzo goes to Originate

Presley Pizzo will be taking a position as a software engineer with Originate (http://www.originate.com/) in September 2015. 

Congratulations Presley!

Language Sciences Summer Scholarship at University of Maryland

 The Office of the Vice President of Research at the University of Maryland is sponsoring the Language Sciences Summer Scholarship Program for undergraduates through the Center for Advanced Study of Language (CASL). This program is entering its fourth summer and has been a great success. Each year we aim to build on past achievements and increase visibility to highly qualified students and their mentors.

Given CASL’s status as a university affiliated research center (UARC) – and as the first and only national resource dedicated to addressing the language science needs of the intelligence community (IC) – potential available projects will demonstrate how the research is relevant to, and has potential impact on, national security issues. 

Purpose of this program: 

— To involve undergraduates in cutting-edge language science research. 

— To introduce student scholars to careers in national security, particularly those that may use and benefit from basic-plus-applied language science research. 

— To build links between research in language science on campus, at CASL and across the IC at large.

Application Process

CASL Language Sciences Summer Scholarships are available to undergraduate students with prior training in language sciences who wish to pursue language science research under close faculty supervision in a more in-depth manner than is possible in the context of the classroom. A minimum commitment of eight weeks is typically expected.

Applicants must be currently enrolled as undergraduates.

Required Items

Applicants for a CASL Summer Scholarship must submit:

A cover letter. This should outline the applicant’s background experience and identify faculty mentors of interest (if any). Cover letters should be in PDF format (please name the file in the following format: firstinitial.lastname_cover.pdf).

A current curriculum vitae or resume. This should also be in PDF format (please name the file this way: firstinitial.lastname _cv.pdf).

Deadline

Review of applications will begin immediately, and will continue until the positions are filled. However, for best consideration, completed applications should be received by May 1, 2015. All application materials should be submitted electronically to Hana Kabashi (hkabashi@umd.edu). NOTE: Include "CASL Summer Scholarship" in the subject line.

POC:

Hana Kabashi, hkabashi@umd.edu; 301-226-8916 Senior Research Coordinator

Research positions for undergraduates at University of Maryland

The Dept. of Linguistics at the U of Maryland is looking to fill up to three full-time positions for post-baccalaureate researchers. Starting date for all positions is Summer/Fall 2015. Salary is competitive, with benefits included. The positions would be ideal for individuals with a BA degree who are interested in gaining significant research experience in a very active research group, as preparation for a research career. Applicants must be US or Canadian citizens or permanent residents, and should have completed a BA or BS degree by the time of appointment. The ability to interact comfortably with a wide variety of people (and machines) is a distinct advantage. Applicants may request to be considered for any of the positions.

The positions are open until filled, but review of applications will begin on April 10, 2015.

Details about these positions may be found here:

http://ling.umd.edu/baggett/jobs

Details about Language Science opportunities at the U of Maryland may be found here:

http://languagescience.umd.edu

Keine and Bhatt in print

Stefan Keine and Rajesh Bhatt’s paper, co-authored with Trupti Nisar, “Complete and defective agreement in Kutchi” has appeared in the latest issue of Linguistic Variation

Call for papers: BUCLD

Join us for a special 40th anniversary meeting of the Boston University Conference on Language Development!  

Lila Gleitman (University of Pennsylvania), the keynote speaker of the very first BUCLD meeting, will reprise her role this year. We will also have a celebratory session looking back to where we've come from and where we're going as a field.

We will be accepting two kinds of submissions: abstracts for 20-minute talks or posters (due May 15), and symposium proposals (due April 15; see below.)


CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Submissions of abstracts for 20-minute talks and posters will be accepted beginning April 1 at:

http://www.bu.edu/bucld/abstracts/abstract-submission/

 DEADLINE.All abstract submissions must be received by 8:00 PM EST, May 15, 2015.

Abstracts must be limited to 500 words, with one extra page for examples, figures, tables, and references. Submissions that present research on any topic in the fields of first and second language acquisition from any theoretical perspectives will be fully considered, including but not limited to: Artificial Languages, Bilingualism, Cognition & Language, Creoles & Pidgins, Dialects, Discourse and Narrative, Gesture, Hearing Impairment and Deafness, Input & Interaction, Language Disorders, Linguistic Theory, Neurolinguistics, Pragmatics, Pre-linguistic Development, Reading and Literacy, Signed Languages, Sociolinguistics, and Speech Perception & Production.

A suggested format and style for abstracts is available at:

http://www.bu.edu/bucld/abstracts/abstract-format/

CALL FOR SYMPOSIUM PROPOSALS
We are also soliciting proposals for 90-minute symposia for the Boston University Conference on Language Development on any topic likely to be of broad interest to the conference attendees. The symposium format is open, but has frequently included 2-3 speakers presenting research from differing angles on a common theme.  

Proposals should include a list of the participants, specific topics, and a specification of the format, and should name at least one organizer who will be able to work with the BUCLD organizing committee in setting up the symposium.  Submissions can be sent by email to langconf@bu.edu with "Symposium proposal" indicated in the subject line.  Please limit symposium proposals to 1000 words or fewer.

DEADLINE: All symposium proposal submissions must be received by April 15, 2015.

Decisions on symposia will be made by June.

FURTHER INFORMATION 

General conference information is available at:

http://www.bu.edu/bucld

Call for papers: IATL 31

IATL 31, the 31st annual meeting of the Israel Association for Theoretical Linguistics, will be held at Bar Ilan University on October 13-14, 2015. Submissions are invited for 30 minute presentations (+ 10 minutes for discussion) of high quality, previously unpublished research in all areas of theoretical linguistics. We are interested in research which tests theories of language in general, including traditional areas of theoretical linguistics and also experimental areas such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, sociolinguistics, and language acquisition.

Thematic Session: Experimental and corpus-based research in theoretical linguistics

Recent years have seen a growing number of researchers employ a variety of experimental and corpus-based research methods to examine questions in different fields of theoretical linguistics. Using such methods has not only provided empirical evidence or counterevidence for abstract theories but also allowed investigations of subtle patterns that are nearly impossible to observe reliably using only the more traditional introspective methods of generative grammar. For this special session we invite submissions of papers presenting previously unpublished research which uses experimental or quantitative methods to shed light on theoretical issues.

Invited Speakers

Donka Farkas, University of California, Santa Cruz

Malte Zimmerman, Potsdam University

Proceedings

IATL publishes its proceedings online, as well as in print via MITWPL; the authors of all accepted and alternate papers are invited to submit their papers for the proceedings.

Abstract Submission Guidelines

Abstracts should be no longer than two pages, including examples and references. Page format: A4, 2,54cm (one inch) margins on all sides, 12-point font, single line spacing; PDF format only. Submissions are restricted to at most one single-authored and one co-authored abstract.

Please submit abstracts to the IATL EasyChair site: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iatl31

Log in as an author using your existing EasyChair username and password if you have one; otherwise, register at the site as an author, and when you receive a password, you can enter the site and submit your abstract. The abstract should be submitted in PDF format through the ‘Upload Paper’ section near the bottom of the page. (Note: Higher up on the page, in the ‘Title and Abstract’ section, there is a box for a plain-text abstract. Since we do not require a shorter abstract, you may simply retype the title of the paper in the abstract box.)

Deadline: March 20, 2015

Important Dates

March 20, 2015: Abstract submission deadline

End of May, 2015: Notification of acceptance to authors

October 13-14, 2015: IATL 31

Conference Links and contacts
IATL 31 on IATL website: http://www.iatl.org.il/?page_id=748IATL 31 on EasyChair: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=iatl31

If you have questions or encounter any problems, please contact Gabi Danon at iatl@complexnp.com

Jill Thorson speaks on March 24

Jill Thorson (Northeastern University) will give a talk entitled "The development of intonation and information structure in early speech perception and production" on Tuesday, March 24th at 5:30 in 225 Herter Hall. An abstract follows.

Abstract

Infants are born with sensitivities to their native language s melody and rhythm. This attunement to prosody affects language development over the first years of life, and impacts early attentional processing, word learning, and speech production. The motivation for the first line of research is to investigate how American English-acquiring toddlers are guided by the mapping between intonation and information structure during on-line reference resolution and novel word learning. Specifically, I ask how specific pitch movements (deaccented/H*/L+H*) systematically predict patterns of attention and subsequent novel word learning abilities depending on the referring or learning condition (new/given/contrastive). Results show that the presence of either newness or a pitch accent facilitates attention, and that toddlers learn better from more prominent learning conditions. A second line of research examines the phonological and phonetic realizations of information categories as produced by toddler and adult speakers of English. During a spontaneous speech task designed as an interactive game, a set of target nouns are labeled and analyzed as new, given, or contrastive. Results reveal that toddlers reflect adult phonological patterns for new and contrastive information, as well as demonstrate a sophisticated usage of the acoustic correlates of intonation. Together, this set of studies demonstrates how higher-level components combine to direct attention to a referent in discourse and how this process helps explain mechanisms that are important for novel word learning and early speech production.

Brunetto and Roeper in Siena

Valentina Brunetto and Tom Roeper are delivering their paper “Self as partition trigger: Evidence against a lexical Strongest Meaning Principle in local anaphora” at a workshop on Implicatures and Presuppositions hosted by the University of Siena, this Thursday and Friday.

Call for papers: GALA

The Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (LLING) is pleased to announce the 12th Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition conference (GALA 12) to be held at the University of Nantes, Nantes (France) on September 10-12, 2015.
 
The conference provides a forum for discussion of recent, high quality research on first and second language acquisition,bilingual acquisition, language pathology, the acquisition of sign language and brain imaging research for acquisition and pathology.
 
GALA 2015 will include, in addition to the Main session, four Workshops:
 
Workshop 1:
Heritage Language Acquisition
Native vs. Heritage vs. Second Language Acquisition
(co-organized with Janet Grijzenhout, BSL, University of Konstanz)
 
Invited Speakers:
Elabbas Benmamoun (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Maria Polinsky (Harvard University)
 
 
Workshop 2:
The Role of Prosody in Early Speech Perception
(Co-organized with Judit Gervain, LPP – UMR 8242, CNRS/Paris V)
 
Invited Speaker:
Marina Nespor (SISSA)
 
 
Workshop 3:
Acquisition of Causation: Culmination Entailments and Agency
(Co-organized with Fabienne Martin, University of Stuttgart)
 
Invited Speakers:
Angeliek van Hout (University of Groningen)
Nina Kazanina (University of Bristol)
 
Workshop 4:
Segments & Interactions in Phonological Acquisition
 
Invited Speaker:
Eirini Sanoudaki (Bangor University)
 
Organizing committee:
 
Jiyoung Choi
Hamida Demirdache
Natasa Knezevic
Oana Lungu
Typhanie Prince
Ali Tifrit
Laurence Voeltzel
 
Call for Papers
 
For the Main Session, we invite abstract submissions for 30 minute oral presentations (including 10 minutes for discussion) or posters of original, unpublished work on all subfields of generative language acquisition: L1 acquisition, L2 acquisition, bilingualism, heritage language acquisition, language pathology, sign language, etc.
 
In addition to the Main Session, there will be four Workshops (see here). The submission rules for the Workshops are the same as those for the Main Session.
 
Submission guidelines:
 
Abstracts should not exceed one page in letter-size or A4 paper, with one extra page for examples, tables, figures and references,with 1 inch or 2.5 cm margins on all sides and 12 point font size. The abstract should have a clear title and should not reveal the name of the author(s). The abstracts must be uploaded as PDF attachments to the EasyChair site. Submissions are limited to one individual and one joint abstract per author, or two joint abstracts per author.
 
When you submit your abstract on the EasyChair site, you will be asked to provide a short summary of the abstract. Upon submission, please indicate whether your work should be considered for an oral presentation (Main Session or one of the Workshops) or for a poster (or both). Submitting the same abstract to both the Main Session and to one of the Workshops is not allowed.
 
To submit an abstract, please go to the following EasyChair page:
 
 
Important dates:
Deadline for submissions: April 1st, 2015, 11:59 PM, CET
Notification of acceptance: May 12, 2015
Conference dates: September 10-12, 2015
 
 
If you have any further questions, please contact us at gala2015@univ-nantes.fr 

Please visit our conference website: www.gala2015.univ-nantes.fr

Call for papers: Linguistic Complexity in the Individual and Society

This conference is associated with the project Linguistic Complexity in the Individual and Society (LCIS; http://www.ntnu.edu/lcis) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. The goal of LCIS is to study linguistic complexity in three different areas: formal grammar, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. The groundbreaking part of this project is that it will attempt to combine these different sub-disciplines of modern linguistics. Different methodologies and theoretical perspectives will be useful in order to illuminate complementary aspects of language complexity and thus contribute to deepening our understanding of this phenomenon. A unifying aspect of the research is the use of multilingual data. These data have become increasingly important for linguistic methodologies and theories, but also for public policy makers in the sense that they address consequences of migration and children growing up acquiring parts of multiple languages. 

The present two-day conference on October 15-16, 2015 will feature talks addressing linguistic complexity within the three areas mentioned above: formal grammar, language acquisition, and sociolinguistics. The following speakers have kindly agreed to provide plenary addresses: 

Artemis Alexiadou (University of Stuttgart)

Frans Gregersen (Copenhagen University, Lanchart))

Liliane Haegeman (Ghent University)

Marie Maegaard & Janus Spindler Møller (Copenhagen University, Lanchart) 

Ianthi Tsimpli (University of Reading/Aristotle University of Thessaloniki)

Call for Papers: 

Abstracts are solicited for 20 minute talks plus 10 minutes for questions. Abstracts should be at most 2 pages written in Times New Roman, 12pt font, on A4 or letter paper. Numbered examples should be included in the text and not added separately at the end. 
Abstracts need to be submitted by midnight (CET) on April 24, 2015 via EasyAbs: http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/lcis

Notifications of acceptance will be sent out by May 20, 2015.

LabPhon 15

Abby Cohn and Sam Tilsen write:

We are pleased to announce that the 15th Conference on LaboratoryPhonology (LabPhon 15) will be held at Cornell University in Ithaca,NY, in 2016. The overall theme of LabPhon 15 is "Speech Dynamics andPhonological Representation”.

Title: LabPhon 15 - The 15th Conference on Laboratory Phonology

Date: July 13-16, 2016

Place: Cornell University, Ithaca, NY USA

Save the Date

Phonological representations are dynamic, shaped by forces on diverse time scales.  On the timescale of utterances, interactions between perceptual, motoric, and memory-related processes provide constraints on phonological representations. These same processes, embedded in learning systems and dynamic social networks, shape representations on developmental and life-span timescales, and in turn influence sound systems on historical timescales. Laboratory phonology, through its rich quantitative and experimental methodologies, contributes to our understanding of phonological systems by providing insight into the mechanisms from which representations emerge.

Conference themes:

Production dynamics: How are representations constructed andimplemented in speech, and what does articulation reveal about thedynamics of production mechanisms? How do these mechanisms shape representations on longer timescales?

Perceptual dynamics: What forms of perceptual representation dospeaker-hearers use and what are the temporal dynamics of perception? How does the interaction between perception and production constrain phonological systems on life-span and diachronic timescales?

Prosodic organization: What are the mechanisms of prosodicorganization and how do they give rise to cross-linguistic differences? What are the connections between perception and production of prosodic structure?

Lexical dynamics and memory: How do experience and lexical memoryinfluence phonological representations? What are the relations between lexical representation, production, and perception across diverse time scales?

Phonological acquisition and changes over the life-span: What is the nature of early representations and how do they change? How does learning a second-language interact with existing representations?

Social network dynamics: How does the structure of social networks influence phonological representations on diverse timescales? What are the roles of perception and production in relation to social network dynamics?

Contributions to any of these themes or to any other aspects oflaboratory phonology will be welcome. A call for papers will be circulated in the fall of 2015.

Questions can be addressed to LabPhon15@cornell.eduUpdates will appear on http://labphon.org/labphon15