This thesis deals with the theory of the phonetic component of grammar in a formal probabilistic inference framework: (1) it has been recognized since the beginning of generative phonology that some language-specific phonetic implementation is actually context-dependent, and thus it can be said that there are gradient “phonetic processes” in grammar in addition to categorical “phonological processes.” However, no explicit theory has been developed to characterize these processes. Meanwhile, (2) it is understood that language ...

Time may be changed

Time may be changed

The IGERT poster and video competition is an annual online event in which IGERT trainees submit a poster and video to compete in three categories: judges' choice, community choice, and public choice. Public choice voting can be done by "liking" a video on Facebook.

This year's entrant for UMD's Biological and Computational Foundations of Language Diversity IGERT is Aaron Steven White from Linguistics. His submission can be viewed here: http://posterhall.org/igert2013 ...

Grads should arrive by 10:30, faculty should arrive by 10:45.

Robots are becoming more and more capable at reasoning about people, objects, and activities in their environments. The ability to extract high-level semantic information from sensor data provides new opportunities for human robot interaction. One such opportunity is to explore interacting with robots via natural language. In this talk I will present our recent work toward enabling robots to interpret, or ground, natural language commands in robot control systems. We build on techniques developed by ...

Questions about the nature of the relationship between language and extralinguistic cognition are old, but only recently has a new view emerged that allows for the systematic investigation of claims about linguistic structure, based on how it is understood or utilized outside of the language system. Our paper represents a case study for this interaction in the domain of event semantics. We adopt a transparency thesis about the relationship between linguistic structure and extralinguistic cognition ...

Since Darwin, emotion and survival have been intertwined. He proposed that emotional states of mind (feelings like fear or pleasure) help organisms adapt and survive. This equation of emotions (feelings) with survival has guided the field ever since. It is now common to use so-called emotional responses as a way of assessing whether a human or animal is in a particular emotional state of mind, like fear. But there is actually little evidence that feelings ...

Linguistic illusions have played an important role in our understanding of how our brains process language. By showing where people are "fooled" by linguistic illusions, we can learn about how linguistic representations are mentally constructed. In this talk, I will show how to make a linguistic illusion appear and disappear, providing new insights into how we encode and navigate complex linguistic representations. In particular, the profile of successes and failures informs our understanding of the ...

We will be discussing Seth Yalcin's ''Nonfactualism about epistemic modality''.

Mayfest is a workshop that brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to discuss fundamental issues in linguistics. Over the course of two days, participants engage in talks and discussion sessions to stimulate new insights and collaboration. This year, we will be discussing the use of prediction in language and its neural instantiation. Researchers studying language perception, production, and development have been invited to speak about the representational properties, temporal dynamics, and ...

A full understanding of the development of the brain's functional network architecture requires not only an understanding of developmental changes in neural processing in individual brain regions but also an understanding of changes in inter-regional interactions. Resting state functional connectivity MRI (rs-fcMRI) is increasingly being used to study functional interactions between brain regions in both adults and children. In this presentation we will briefly review methods used to study functional interactions and networks with ...

Children have to face a variety of challenges when listening to speech. Often, the speech signal that reaches their ears may not be ideal: the signal may be degraded in some form, or there may be background noise, or the speaker may have an unfamiliar accent. This talk will be a broad overview of a number of studies coming from HESP examining how children adjust for these sources of variability in the signal.

rERP: Estimating ERPs using statistical regression

The traditional approach to estimating event-related potential (ERP) signals is to use averaging. This works well, but places severe limitations on experimental design. The theory underlying ERP analyses requires that stimuli vary only in a small number of categorical variables, with all other properties balanced, and events well-separated in time. These restrictions rule out many potentially interesting paradigms, and are nearly impossible to satisfy properly when studying a domain ...

Adult humans quantify, label, and categorize almost every aspect of the world with numbers. The ability to use numbers is one of the most complex cognitive abilities that humans possess and is often held up as a defining feature of the human mind. In my talk I will present a body of data that demonstrates that there are strong developmental and evolutionary precursors to adult mathematical cognition that can be uncovered by studying human infants ...

Human brain function is the result of a highly organized network of connections linking unique areas across the brain. While much research has been devoted to identifying the specialization of distinct functional areas, recent work has argued that we may be able to significantly supplement our current understanding of brain function by characterizing it in terms of its underlying network organization. The mathematical discipline of graph theory is a powerful tool that has recently been ...

I'll be presenting the results of a new eye-tracking study on adults' computation of conventional and ad-hoc scalar implicatures during real-time comprehension.

English speakers know that the sentence "Alice saw herself in the mirror" means that Alice saw Alice in the mirror and the sentence "Alice saw her in the mirror" means that Alice saw someone else in the mirror. In other words, they know herself is a reflexive pronoun and her is a non-reflexive pronoun. Learning these grammatical categories of pronouns poses a circularity problem. In order to learn that a pronoun is reflexive, learners need ...

We will be discussing Perry's "The Problem of the Essential Indexical".

Although Aristotle designated it as one of five basic senses, touch is a complex sense that encompasses numerous modalities (e.g., stretch, pressure, hair movements, vibration). Correspondingly, the touch-sensitive neurons that tile the body's surface display a remarkable array of force sensitivities, neural outputs and cellular morphologies. Although forward genetic screens have identified dozens of essential molecules in invertebrate mechanosensory neurons, we are only now beginning to uncover molecular players that govern the unique ...

Landau (2000) identifies a split between P(artial) C (ontrol) predicates (e.g., want), which admit a proper superset relation between the controller and PRO, and E(xhaustive) C(ontrol) predicates (e.g., try), which require absolute identity:

(1) a. John_1 wanted [PRO_{1+c} to eat lunch together at noon]. (c = contextually salient others) b. *John_1 tried [PRO_1 to eat lunch together at noon].

Landau (2000); Pearson (2013) both single out tense as a ...

Human populations are able to rapidly acquire knowledge and technology specific to a wide range of environments. The received explanation for this fact is that humans are better than other animals at causal reasoning. In this talk, I present theoretical work that shows that gradual cultural evolution can lead to the rapid evolution of complex technologies without causal understanding, and some empirical results that suggest some aspects of the design of traditional houses in a ...

Learning the meanings of words with visible referents is hard (Quine 1960). The task gets much harder when the word's referent is not even in principle visible (Gleitman 1990, Gillette et al. 1999). Predicates referring to mental states (e.g. think), desires (e.g. want), and speech acts (e.g. say)—known as attitude verbs—fall squarely into the second category. How do learners converge on the correct meanings for these words?

One proposal ...

Sentences like (1) present familiar puzzles for the familiar idea that declarative sentences of a natural language have truth conditions.

(1) The first numbered sentence in 'Framing Event Variables' is false.

Action reports like (2) and (3), which might be used to describe a scene in which two chipmunks chased each other, illustrate other (perhaps even harder) puzzles for this idea.

(2) Alvin chased Theodore gleefully and athletically but not skillfully.

(3) Theodore chased Alvin ...

Practice talks by Brad and Yuki. Starting with Brad at 11:30am.

Rachel and Naho will be practicing their upcoming CLS talk: "Three year olds' understanding of 'know' and 'think'".

This talk will be an overview of the past, present, and future of the ICSI/UCB Neural Theory of Language (NTL) project. The first section will outline the multi-disciplinary foundations of NTL. The second section will describe continuing efforts to build practical language-understanding systems using these principles. The current application focus is on metaphor understanding and teaching complex tasks to robots. The final discussion will suggest reformulating a unified Cognitive Science based on "Actionability" instead ...

It is commonly observed that some phonological positions are associated with prominence while others are not. Prominent positions tend to be characterized by having more robust phonetic cues or a wide range of phonological contrasts, while non-prominent positions have weaker cues and fewer contrasts (e.g., Beckman 1999, Smith 2000). Prominence, however, has often been used as an explanation (e.g., there are more contrasts in a certain “strong” positions because they are psycholinguistically or ...

When I say “the theater is packed tonight” or “there are a lot of people in the theater tonight,” my utterance leaves a certain amount of uncertainty about the actual number of people in the theater. The same uncertainty is usually present when I say “the theater is full tonight” (even if the number of seats in the theater is known) or “there are 1000 people in the theater tonight.” In all cases, this can ...

Elizabeth will discuss how timing predictability affects neural activity and a potential related study.

This is a practice job talk for a position at the University of Leipzig. The working title is 'the syntax of non-syntactic dependencies'

We will be discussing Barbara Partee's "Semantics: Mathematics or Psychology?".

Across a large number of departments at the University of Maryland, researchers are pursuing lines of inquiry pertaining to mental states like beliefs and desires. The goal of PHLINT – the internal workshop of PHLING – is to afford an opportunity for members of the UMD community to share their work with colleagues from other departments on campus, bringing into conversation research in different disciplines. Our hope is that this will foster greater communication between researchers in ...

Much debate in recent years has focused on whether post-verbal elements/PVEs in SOV Hindi are derived via leftwards LCA-compatible movement (Mahajan 1997a/b, 2003), or must be assumed to result from some kind of rightwards non-antisymmetric movement applying to informationally backgrounded constituents (Bhatt and Dayal 2007, Manetta 2012). A second phenomenon, scope restrictions on wh in situ elements in post-verbal CPs, is often linked to the syntactic analysis of PVEs. Comparing Hindi with Bangla ...

Abstract: I will discuss advances in the development & use of genetically encoded indicators of neural activity. Recently we have developed probes to directly image synaptic glutamate transmission, and calcium indicators with sufficient sensitivity to detect post-synaptic potentials. These reagents have been deployed in a number of in vivo settings, from C. elegans to rodent. I will highlight our recent discoveries, most of them unpublished or recently published.

The proposed study aims to investigate whether second language (L2) learners can acquire implicit knowledge of English articles, which has been found to be problematic especially for L2 learners whose first language does not possess articles. The current study employs the visual-world paradigm, which tracks eye-movement to a visual context during online sentence processing. The advantages for visual-world paradigm for measuring implicit knowledge are discussed. We focus on the two grammatical functions in the English ...

When two different images are presented to the two eyes at the corresponding retinal locations, observers often experience binocular rivalry - alternating perception of the two images. In a number of behavioral and neuroimaging experiments using binocular rivalry as a tool, we showed that object category information is available in the brain from the suppressed images, and observers' spatial attention could be guided by certain types of invisible images. With a frequency-tagged SSVEP measure, we also ...

Following from our discussion last week, this week in LingBrains we'll discuss the mysteries of basic lexical frequency. How do current word processing theories actually account for frequency effects, and who is arguing with who? Are corpus measures of lexical frequency systematically skewed? Should we expect to see lexical frequency effects on pre-activation (contextual prediction) or re-activation (dependencies)?

Modeling the generation of human movement can be extraordinarily difficult owing to the complexity of the underlying musculoskeletal system. The dynamics equations are non-linear and have many degrees of freedom, making them all but intractable to solve directly. We posit that this system can be simplified if its movements are modeled as a set of basis movements that can be adapted to varying conditions. We show that the command torques for such movements can be ...

The acquisition of attitude verbs has been a topic of interest to researchers in linguistics and psychology for many years. Attitude verbs are a subclass of verbs we use to talk about the contents of other people’s minds. There is a well-documented gap between two particular subclasses of attitude verbs: belief verbs and desire verbs. Many different studies have shown that children acquire the language of desire much sooner than that of belief. This ...

Ellen will discuss the recent paper by Roger Levy and Nathaniel Smith about the relationship between predictability and reading time and talk a bit about a new ERP study aimed at quantifying the effects of predictability on the N400 with adjective-noun pairs.

We will be discussing Stephen Stich and Shaun Nichols' 1992 paper "Folk Psychology: Simulation or Tacit Theory" as well as selections from Ian Apperly's 2008 book "Mindreaders".

Young children have poor cognitive control and difficulty overriding temporary misinterpretations during language processing. We explore whether cognitive control supports syntax-based word-learning when children have to revise misinterpretations. Using preferential-looking, we test whether 20-month-olds are able to use syntax to assign meaning (instrument vs. patient) to novel nouns in sentences containing patient-biased verbs ("She's pushing with the blicket" vs. "She's pushing the blicket"). We also assess infants' cognitive control using a working memory ...

How does memory for recent words interact with expectations generated during sentence comprehension? Recent work has provided empirical support to the idea that context actively modulates lexical access by impacting comprehenders' expectations about the identity of upcoming words. However, very little work has been done to address whether and how lexical and contextual factors combine during sentence processing. I will present an electrophysiological experiment that our group (MERP) conducted to examine the contribution of two ...

Lawrence will discuss Warrier et al. (2009) "Relating Structure to Function: Heschl’s Gyrus and Acoustic Processing"

We will be discussing Donka Farkas' 1992 paper "On the semantics of subjunctive complements".

Synaptic structural and functional plasticity underlies many forms of enduring behavioral experience, including learning and memory. The molecular mechanisms that drive coordinated remodeling of both synaptic form and function remain mostly undefined. The focus of my talk is on newly recognized roles for matrix metalloproteinases (MMPs) in rapid remodeling of the synaptic microenvironment associated with synaptic and behavioral plasticity. MMPs are a large family of extracellularly-acting, mostly secreted proteases whose targets include extracellular matrix (ECM ...

It has long been acknowledged that growing up in poverty is associated with a host of developmental risks, particularly in the domain of language. The effects of SES on vocabulary have been well studied, yet we know less about the degree to which SES may affect syntactic development. While it is acknowledged that syntactic development is largely guided by innate predispositions, in this talk I present evidence of SES differences in five-year-old children’s performance ...

In humans, hippocampal function is generally recognized as supporting episodic memory, whereas in rats, many believe that the hippocampus creates maps of the environment and supports spatial navigation. How do we reconcile the episodic memory and spatial mapping views of hippocampal function? Here I will discuss evidence that, during learning of what happens where, hippocampal place cells map the locations of events in their spatial context. In addition, I will describe recent findings that, during ...

We claim that the root nonfinite verb phenomenon, or Optional Infinitive Stage, is a subcase of the larger phenomenon of Interface Delay, as a result of which distinct domains of cognition experience gradual development of their capacity to communicate with one another. Root nonfinite verbs, then, are the result of the delayed development of temporal anaphora – a construct that requires the interaction of syntax with the representation of interlocutors’ common ground perspectives. In the absence ...

Languages display dependencies between pronouns and noun phrases, with co-reference allowed in phrases such as “John ate dinner while he watched television”. Some other constructions are ruled out by the supposedly universal and innate principle-C constraint, making co-reference impossible in “he ate dinner while John watched television.” But there also exist language-specific restrictions on co-reference such as the Russian poka-constraint, which only acts on sentences with fronted adjunct ‘while’-clauses, disallowing co-reference in sentences such ...

We will be discussing David Braun's 2000 paper "Russellianism and Psychological Generalizations".

The goal of this talk is to provide a principled account of the factors determining whether a given control verb permits partial control, in terms of semantic properties of the predicate in question.

The ability of certain control predicates to participate in configurations where the controller is a proper subset of the plurality given by the understood subject constitutes a puzzle in the study of control. Such predicates include intend, remember and be glad:

1a ...

Although there is substantive evidence of implicit learning (without intention or awareness) of form to form mappings in cognitive psychology, findings in the field of second language acquisition have been inconclusive. This study we report investigated the possibility of adults acquiring a second language morphosyntactic rule implicitly. For the experiment, 65 adult native speakers of English without formal training in language sciences were randomly assigned to one of three groups, (two experimental and one control ...

Sometimes off-topic asides during classes lead to ridiculous ideas. This is such a time. Golestani et al. (2011) found that, unsurprisingly, expert phoneticians are weird. In this case, the weirdness in question is in terms of brain morphology. Expert phoneticians are more likely to have more or modified gyri in auditory cortex, and size of pars opercularis is positively correlated with phonetics experience. However, despite attempts in the paper to determine whether each difference between ...

Why can I tell you that I 'ran for five minutes' but not that I 'ran all the way to the store for five minutes'? Why can you say that there are 'five pounds of books' in this package if it contains several books, but not 'five pounds of book' if it contains only one? What keeps you from using 'sixty degrees of water' to tell me the temperature of the water in your pool ...

Researchers in the cognitive sciences have long debated the relationships between linguistic input and language structure, as well as the relationships between language and cognition. Homesign systems offer a unique window into these relationships. Homesigns are gesture systems developed by deaf individuals who are not exposed to conventional sign or spoken language input. Homesign systems exhibit a number of linguistic properties, but appear to lack others, which depend on access to a linguistic model and ...

A general architecture of language production starts from message encoding, goes to lemma selection, lexeme retrieval, segmental retrieval, syllable construction, and to articulation (Ferreira, 2010). Proximate unit is the first selectable phonological unit after lexeme retrieval in spoken word production, and previous research suggested that the proximate unit differs across languages (O’Seaghdha, et al., 2010). Phoneme is considered to be the proximate unit in English, whereas syllable segment is the proximate unit in Mandarin ...

This week we'll discuss Mirman, McClelland, & Holt (2005): "Computational and behavioral investigations of lexically induced delays in phoneme recognition"

We will be discussing Crimmins & Perry's 1989 paper, "The Prince and the Phone Booth: Reporting Puzzling Beliefs".

Research on first language acquisition has typically focused on characterizing children's linguistic competence at specific time points. While this research is of critical importance, it provides little insight about how transitions between the time points arises, or about how knowledge of language interacts with more general cognitive processes in the course of sentence processing. Both of these issues have recently been receiving more attention, by means of research demonstrating how children's performance on ...

This week we're going to continue the discussion on possibilities for measuring neurophysiological effects of lexical neighborhood/lexical entropy. We'll read Holcomb, Grainger & O'Rourke (2002) 'An Electrophysiological Study of the Effects of Orthographic Neighborhood Size on Printed Word Perception'.

A growing body of research using both behavioral and neuroimaging data points to a significant effect of bilingualism on cognitive outcomes across the lifespan. The main finding is evidence for the enhancement of executive control at all stages in the lifespan, with the most dramatic results being maintained cognitive performance in elderly adults, and protection against the onset of dementia. A more complex picture emerges when the cognitive advantages of bilingualism are considered together with ...

Language acquisition lab meeting on the Puffin study for this semester.

Verbs play a central role in constraining the structure of a sentence. However, in language production, whether verbs play an essential role in sentence formulation processes is still controversial (rf. Griffin & V. Ferreira, 2006). Some argue that sentence production may proceed in radically incremental (i.e., word-by-word) manner, without a guidance of verbs’ lexical information, especially in head-final languages (e.g., Iwasaki, 2011). This claim implies that verbs are not necessarily coded in early stage ...

Philosophers, cognitive scientists, and neuroscientists tend to have very different ideas about how to define a representation. I certainly won’t settle this issue in my talk, but I hope to provide data that informs how we think about visual representations, and why we cannot have more of them at once. I will focus on temporary information buffers (attention and working memory), and argue that these buffers have a two-dimensional “map” architecture where individual items ...

New meeting time this semester! We'll be discussing a MEG paper by Gagnepain et al. (2012) on 'Temporal predictive codes for spoken words in auditory cortex'.

Winter Storm is an annual FREE 2-week intensive training workshop for language scientists. It takes place on the University of Maryland campus, Monday through Friday, January 7-18. It is organized by students from the campus-wide NSF-IGERT program in language science, and it is sponsored by IGERT and by Linguistics and UMIACS.

Winter Storm 2013 is open to all interested participants. Past years have attracted up to 100 participants. There is no cost for participation.

Students in LING499 spend the semester working in the Project on Children's Language Learning lab and contributing to novel research progressing in the lab. Here, they will present posters on the research projects they have been working on.

The English language is rife with expressions that involve the word might. For example, you are reading this abstract, but you might have decided to read something else instead. Although this claim is undoubtedly true, it is not clear what makes it to be true: what fact it happens to express.

Counterpart theory is a formal language designed to express the meanings of claims involving the word might. According to the counterpart theorist, the claim ...

In my 895 I address the question of categorical effects in perception on three classes of phonemes: Vowels, Stop Consonants, and Fricatives. First, I explore previous work related to the categorical effects of vowels and stop consonants. Then, I review work on Fricatives and present my own work on behavioral and neural evidence for categorical effects in fricative perception. I proceed to review an existing model for the Perceptual Magnet Effect in vowels, and extend ...

Dustin Chacón will lead our discussion.

Positing a morpheme-based route to complex word recognition entails not only access to morphological constituents, but also mechanisms for the initial segmentation of words into putative constituents, and compositional processes operating on these constituent representations. In this talk, I will present some recent findings on segmentation, morphological activation, and composition in complex words, including evidence from priming, lexical decision, and passive reading paradigms, in tandem with the electrophysiological brain imaging methods EEG and MEG. The ...

Title: Rethinking priming: Is it simply prediction?

Contenders: Wing Yee Chow, Sol Lago

Moderator: Shevaun Lewis

Special appearance: Rob Fiorentino (U of Kansas)

Abstract: Priming is one of the most well established psycholinguistic phenomena. When a target word is preceded by a related prime (e.g., doctor-NURSE), processing of the target word is facilitated across various experimental measures. This important finding has been taken to reflect automatic spread of activation between words in the lexicon ...

Human language appears to be unique in the animal kingdom, but precisely what its role is in distinctively human thought has been the subject of intense debate. For many, this issue is sidelined in favor of investigating the perhaps more obvious role of language in distinctively human communication. The net result appears to be that while philosophers and psychologists have offered quite explicit proposals about the relationship between language-and-thought or language-and-communication, rarely are the two ...

I challenge a recent attempt by Antony Eagle to defend the possibility of deterministic chance. Eagle argues that statements of the form ‘x has a (non-trivial) chance to φ’ are equivalent in common usage (and in their truth-conditions) to those of the form ‘x can φ’. The effect of this claim on the debate about the compatibility of (non-trivial) chances with a deterministic world seems to be relatively straightforward. If ‘x has a chance to ...

Lab meeting discussing Romy's syntactic revision study.

Before hearing onset, neuronal activity in developing auditory pathways is dominated by rhythmic patterns of spontaneous action potentials. It has remained controversial whether this stereotypic pattern is important for the development or refinement of central auditory pathways. I will present recent results which demonstrate that genetic ablation of cholinergic neurotransmission to developing cochlear hair cells alters the temporal fine structure without affecting the overall level of spontaneous activity. These abnormal activity patterns interfered with the ...

In this talk, I will discuss two new problems for the satisfaction theory of presupposition. In 1996 Bart Geurts pointed out that a certain impossibility predicted by the satisfaction theory of presupposition was not borne out; he called this the Proviso Problem. Where the theory predicted that there could be no atomic, or logically strong presuppositions of conditional sentences, Geurts found that in many very natural cases, the presupposition projected is just the strong one ...

There is a tradition of linguistic research starting with the earliest work in generative grammar that aims to employ notions of computational restrictiveness (e.g, generative capacity, parsing complexity, etc.) to explain general properties of human language. When such work is successful, it provides theoretical simplification as well as a means for understanding (as opposed to stipulating) why human grammars are structured as they are. This tradition has been applied widely in the linguistic domains ...

Wednesday, November 28th at 4 pm in 1103 Taliaferro

When engaging with a work of fiction one task we must accomplish is determining what is true of the fictional world described by the work. Fictions prescribe particular authorized games of make-believe. It is a challenging task to determine which fictional truths are prescribed by a fiction even when dealing with paradigms of fiction such as literature and film. Inconsistencies and incomplete aspects threaten to make ...

Mike McCourt will lead our discussion.

Silvina Montrul is Professor and Head of the Dept of Spanish and Portuguese at the U. of Illinois, where she also holds appointments in Linguistics and the Second Language Acquisition Program. She is the editor of the journal Second Language Research, and she is the founder and director of the University Language Academy for Children, a program that promotes Spanish-language education for non-native speakers and language maintenance for heritage speakers. In recent years her research ...

The goal of this paper is to defend Tyler Burge’s (1973) approach to the semantics of proper names, according to which proper names are predicates in their own right. On this predicate approach, the predicative contents of proper names figure in the computation of meaning at two different levels. Depending on its linguistic environment, a proper name contributes its metalinguistic content either to the presupposition or assertive content of a sentence. The singular use ...

I present evidence that speakers of Cochabamba Quechua are aware of non-local restrictions on laryngeal features in their language, and look at whether typological asymmetries have an impact on the synchronic knowledge of Quechua speakers.

Quechua exhibits two non-local restrictions of interest: a cooccurrence restriction prohibits pairs of ejectives within roots (e.g., [k'ap'i], and an ordering restriction prohibits roots with an initial plain stop and a medial ejective (e.g., [kap’i ...

Since Darwin, emotion and survival have been intertwined. He proposed that emotional states of mind (feelings like fear or pleasure) help organisms adapt and survive. This equation of emotions (feelings) with survival has guided the field ever since. It is now common to use so-called emotional responses as a way of assessing whether a human or animal is in a particular emotional state of mind, like fear. But there is actually little evidence that feelings ...

It is often assumed that humans are inherently selfish, and cultural norms and practices have to override these tendencies to enable altruistic behavior. Specifically, young children are thought to be driven mainly by immediate selfish motivations, acquiring altruistic behaviors through the internalization of social norms or being rewarded for socially desired behavior. Moreover, it has been argued that our closest evolutionary relatives are motivated by selfish interests alone, not caring about the needs of others ...

Looking back to human language history, it is almost always the case that spoken language precedes written language. Also, developmentally, children learn to speak much earlier than they learn to write. Hence, speech is usually considered to be the primary linguistic modality, whilewritten language is taken to be a cultural artifact used to document the oral speech. This is an orthoxy in the history of Linguistics. Saussure (1916) contends that the only reason for the ...

Quinn Harr will lead our discussion on Kripke's "Puzzle about Belief".

Discussion of highlights from the Neurobiology of Language Conference

Professor Barbara Partee (Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy Emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) will be giving a series of three lectures (handouts here), generously supported by Dave Baggett.

This third lecture follows on the first, but it is not meant for a fully general audience. Still it should be accessible to students as well as colleagues in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, etc., and it does not presuppose the content of the second.

Abstract ...

Our nose can identify millions of individual odors and group mixtures of odors into specific percepts. An odor is recognized independently of its concentrations and other background odors. A lot is known about the initial step of information processing: odors are sensed by a large family of olfactory receptors. Each odor excites multiple receptors and each receptor is activated by multiple odors. Information about the external world is transmitted to the brain in a combinatorial ...

Professor Barbara Partee (Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy Emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is giving a series of three lectures (handouts here), generously supported by Dave Baggett.

This second lecture follows on the content of the first, but it is not for a general audience. Still it should be accessible to students as well as colleagues in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, etc..

Abstract

The history of formal semantics as described in Lecture I ...

Professor Barbara Partee (Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy Emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) is giving a series of three lectures (handouts here), generously supported by Dave Baggett.

This first lecture is intended for a general audience.

Abstract

There have been centuries of study of logic and of language. Many philosophers and logicians have argued that natural language is logically deficient, or even that “natural language has no logic”. And before the birth of ...

Professor Barbara Partee (Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics and Philosophy Emerita, University of Massachusetts, Amherst) will be giving a series of three lectures (handouts here), generously supported by Dave Baggett.

The first lecture is intended to be accessible to a general audience but still interesting for linguists and philosophers. The second and third lectures should be accessible to students as well as colleagues in linguistics, philosophy, cognitive science, etc.. The second and the third each ...

Rachel Dudley will lead our discussion of de Villiers (2005) and some issues in the acquisition of attitudes.

Recent advances in network science have greatly increased our understanding of the structure and function of many networked systems, ranging from transportation networks, to social networks, the internet, ecosystems, and biochemical and gene transcription pathways. Network approaches are also increasingly applied to the brain, at several levels of scale from cells to entire brain systems. We now know that brain networks exhibit a number of characteristic topological features, including small-world attributes, modularity and hubs. I ...

Young children have both poor cognitive control (CC) and difficulty overriding temporary misinterpretations during language processing. We explored whether CC supports syntax-based word-learning when children have to revise misinterpretations. Using preferential-looking, we tested whether 20-month-olds could use syntax to assign meaning (instrument vs. patient) to novel nouns in sentences containing patient-biased verbs (“She’s pushing with the blicket” vs. “She’s pushing the blicket”). We also assessed infants’ CC using a working memory game. High- ...

Many biological functions oscillate over the course of a day, and the precise timing of these rhythms depends on synchronization to the solar cycle. Changes in day length, shift-work, and transmeridian travel, which disrupt exposure to the solar cycle, lead to mood and cognitive function deficits. Sleep deprivation and circadian disruption are known to underlie mood and cognitive disorders associated with irregular light schedules. However, little is known about the ability of light to directly ...

Florian Schwarz, from the University of Pennsylvania, will present joint work with Sonja Tiemann, University of Tuebingen. Abstract below.

One prominent line of experimental research on meaning in the past decade or so has been concerned with the relative time course of different aspects of meaning unfolding in online processing, mostly with a focus on scalar implicatures vs. literal meaning. More recent work has begun to look at the processing of presuppositions as yet another ...

Classical theories of cognition are symbolic, relying on rules and complex mental data structures. These approaches are powerful and inherently systematic but often brittle and intolerant of noise, and do not reflect the low-level structure of human brains. Connectionist or "sub-symbolic" approaches do reflect brain structure and are robust to noise, but are generally viewed as opaque and, often, as incapable of representing the complex structures necessary for higher cognition. What if we could combine ...

A guest lecture in Valentine and Jeff's seminar on attitudes.

In natural language processing, the bootstrapping algorithm introduced by David Yarowsky (15 years ago) is a discriminative unsupervised learning algorithm that uses some seed rules to bootstrap a classifier (this is the ordinary sense of bootstrapping which is distinct from the Bootstrap in statistics). The Yarowsky algorithm works remarkably well on a wide variety of NLP classification tasks such as distinguishing between word senses and deciding if a noun phrase is an organization, location, or ...

Megan Sutton presenting practice talk on PRC study for BUCLD; Kate Harrigan presenting practice talk on Want study for BUCLD

Five undergraduate Linguistics majors received summer funding in 2012 to work on research under the guidance of a Linguistics faculty member. Come hear what they did, or come find out where their funding came from and how you can get similar funding next summer.

Sound encoding at the synapse between inner hair cells and spiral ganglion neurons in the mammalian cochlea operates with submillisecond temporal precision, drives neural spiking at hundreds per second over hours and covers sound pressures that span six orders of magnitude. When hair cells transduce a sound driven mechanical stimulus into an electrical signal, voltage-gated CaV1.3 L-type Ca2+ channels open and the Ca2+ influx triggers exocytosis of glutamate filled vesicles at their ribbon synapses ...

The Mid-Atlantic Student Colloquium on Speech, Language and Learning is a one day event bringing together faculty, researchers and students from universities in the Mid-Atlantic area working in Speech/Language/ML. The colloquium is an opportunity to present preliminary or completed work and to network with other students, faculty and researchers working in related fields. The event will be hosted at the University of Maryland, College Park (College Park, MD) on October 19, 2012.

There is current interest in how we are able to make an estimate of the approximate number of objects in a scene: existing evidence suggests that we may have a dedicated "visual number" sense that may even be linked to mathematical ability. In this talk I will present evidence from my lab that, contrary to this position, human sense of number is not independent of our sense of space/distance and that our ability to ...

In most countries around the world, infants are exposed to multiple accent and dialectal variants of the native language early in life. This variation in exposure is the result of existing and expanding multicultural contacts (e.g., accessibility to foreign media) and multilingualism, and is relevant for both monolingual and bilingual children across cultures. Early on, children must therefore identify the components of speech that are relevant for language comprehension, and make talker generalizations that ...

Previous studies from different languages have suggested that online pronoun resolution is sensitive to semantic, syntactic and phonological information about the antecedent, but are challenged by the finding that, in English, reading times on pronouns vary inversely with the frequency of their antecedents. In two eye-tracking experiments, I re-examine this question by exploring how the lexical frequency of the antecedent affects reading times after a pronoun. The results show that reading times following pronouns are ...

One goal of time research is to link the dynamics of brain processes (temporal processes) with the conscious experience of time (time perception). Traditionally, the hallmark of time perception has been the experience of duration requiring at least two temporal markers: onset and offset of an event delimiting an interval or ‘time quantity’ that the brain needs to estimate in order to elicit our experience of time. It has become clear that neural oscillations provide ...

There are at least two notable differences between English and Japanese attitude attributions. A first difference is that Japanese has more complementizer options and different verbs select a different set of complementizers (Kuno, 1973). For example, the factive verb koukaisuru (‘regret’) takes the complement type koto, but it is incompatible with to, whereas the verb of saying iu (‘say’) is compatible with to, but not with koto. A second difference, which I focus on in ...

Poster presentation by Kate Harrigan on Want, and by Susan Teubner Rhodes on InstWM, in preparation for BUCLD

Aaron will give a NELS practice talk on the informativity of syntactic cues for attitude verb acquisition. Dave will be talking about Crossover and Principle C.

Word selection in language production is not a simple task; it involves activating the appropriate word form while avoiding similarly activated semantic and phonological competitors. Bilingual language production seems to be even more challenging, as lexical items from multiple languages become competitors as well. Many models of bilingual lexical selection suggest that a form of inhibitory control enables selection in the correct language. Some models, however, suggest that lexical selection might not rely domain general ...

Practice talk for MASC-SL

Comparing EEG and eyetracking measures of sentence comprehension

Philosophy Colloquium Talk
David Miller, Professor, University of Warwick

If You Must Do Confirmation Theory, Do It This Way

In this talk I begin to draw together, and package into a coherent philosophical position, a number of ideas that in the last 25 years I have alluded to, or sometimes stated explicitly, concerning the properties and the merits of the measure of deductive dependence q(c | a) of one proposition c on another proposition a ...

Pregroup Grammar is a type logical grammar formalism derived from Categorial Grammar. Unlike most formalisms, however, it has a radically flattened conception of sentence structure, making it interesting to syntacticians interested in the nature of structure dependence and other related aspects of UG. This tutorial will introduce the Pregroup Grammar formalism, as well as its two standard semantic theories, the "syntactic" lambda-calculus-like semantics and the "quantum-mechanical" tensor algebra semantic.

Computational approaches to phonology have gained in popularity in recent years. These approaches use models to formalize hypotheses about how people learn aspects of sound structure, or to investigate basic principles about how sound systems are organized. The Northeast Computational Phonology Workshop (NECPhon) is an informal gathering of scholars interested in any aspect of computational phonology. Our goal is to provide a relaxed atmosphere where researchers can share their latest work. This is the sixth ...

Lab meeting discussing the Know study this semester

Music is a fundamentally human activity that is celebrated worldwide and from a young age, but why we know and love our music has remained a mystery. Epic successes and failures in the human history of music, from Mozart to Hillary Clinton, are informative of the neural systems that give rise to musical ability. I will describe behavioral, structural and functional neuroimaging, and brain-stimulation studies that use music as a model to understand and to ...

I will address the basic question of how much a person can think about at one time, and how the contents of the conscious mind might be measured. In 1956 George A. Miller, a founding cognitive psychologist who died recently, suggested that the amount of information that one can recall from a just-presented list is fixed at about seven meaningful units, or chunks. Two critically important issues about this working memory capacity limit were left ...

It is commonly acknowledged that "what is said" is not the same as "what is meant." In conversation, listeners must infer what speakers intend to communicate, drawing on not only the information in the linguistic signal, but also their own knowledge about the immediate context, the speaker, the world at large, and the conversational conventions of their community. These inferences lead to "pragmatic enrichment" of sentence meanings at a number of levels, ranging from the ...

Center for Children, Relationships, and Culture & Developmental Science Field Committee Co-Sponsored Colloquium Series

Benjamin Building, Room 2119

Peter Carruthers
Professor, Department of Philosophy
University of Maryland

Psycholinguistic upshots of OT (Optimality Theory)

Chris LaTerza will lead our discussion on Lewis (1979).

Lab meeting discussing the Puffin study this semester

Debate persists over whether Mandarin Chinese, a language with no overt agreement marking and (arguably) no overt tense marking, exhibits a (covert) finite/nonfinite split. Proponents of such a split point to asymmetries in the properties of complement clauses that they argue are most naturally explained by positing a finite/nonfinite distinction (C-T. J. Huang 1982, 1984, 1987, 1989; Li 1985, 1990; C.C. Tang 1990; Ernst 1994; T.C. Tang 2000; T-.H. J ...

All our sensors are noisy and our perception of the world is incomplete. Hence, the brain needs to solve a statistical problem: estimate the state of the world based on incomplete information. We use perceptual and imaging studies to ask how the brain solves such statistical problems. Following ideas inspired by Bayesian statistics we ask how the brain represents and computes with uncertainty.

Dustin Chacón, Candise Lin, Angela He, and Sol Lago will be presenting on their IGERT Rotations and other interdisciplinary work. Lunch provided by Shevaun Lewis.

MEG timing and discussion of Breen, Kingston, & Sanders

Abstract: Claims that certain traits are innate abound in the biological and cognitive sciences. Having legs is said to be an innate trait for frogs (and many other species), and the capacity to learn a language is said to be innate for humans. These claims appear to be intended as explanatory statements—the fact that a trait is innate is meant to perform some work towards explaining things that we would like our biological and ...

Lab meeting discussing the PRC study this semester

Essentialism is the idea that items have an underlying reality that explains their manifest appearance and determines their identity. I argue that essentialism is an early cognitive bias. Young children's concepts reflect a deep commitment to essentialism, and this commitment leads children to look beyond the obvious in many converging ways: when learning words, generalizing knowledge to new category members, reasoning about the insides of things, contemplating the role of nature versus nurture, and ...

Philosophy Colloquium Talk
Fabrizio Cariani, Assistant Professor, Northwestern University

Three Grades of Decision-Theoretic Involvement (in Semantics)

There has been a lot of interest in how to derive some broadly decision theoretic verdicts concerning deontic modalities and their interactions with conditionals. It is easy to argue that a traditional Kratzer-style premise-semantics needs some revisions in order to get these facts right. The difficulty is how to develop a semantic theory that gets those facts while remaining ...

Student members will briefly introduce the group to their work, and we will discuss Frege's "The Thought".

The University of Maryland hosts the largest and most integrated community of language scientists in North America. Language Science Day aims to bring together the cross-departmental community of language science students and faculty to improve awareness of the rich opportunities for language science at the University of Maryland. The goal is to showcase research activities and opportunities, to make students aware of training possibilities, and to jump-start potential interdisciplinary connections. This is the third annual ...

Humans weave phonological patterns instinctively. We form phonological patterns at birth; like songbirds, we do so spontaneously, even in the absence of an adult model, and we impose phonological design not only on our natural linguistic communication but also on invented cultural technologies—reading and writing. Why are humans—young and mature—compelled to generate phonological patterns? And how can phonological patterns be intimately grounded in their sensorimotor channels (oral or manual) while remaining partly ...

Philosophy Colloquium Talk
Darren Bradley, Assistant Professor, CUNY

Functionalism and the Independence Problems

The independence problems for functionalism stem from the worry that functional properties that are defined in terms of their causes and effects are not sufficiently independent of those purported causes and effects. I distinguish three different ways the independence problems can be filled out – in terms of necessary connections, conceptual connections and vacuous explanations. I argue that none of these present serious ...

Embodied cognition is an idea in high fashion. Concepts are postulated to entail simulations of sensory experiences or reenactments of motor behavior with instances of these concepts. I will argue that strong versions of embodied cognition are untenable. The choice between a purely symbolic and a fully embodied cognition obscures a more realistic question: what does it mean for cognition to be “grounded” in perception and action and still permit abstraction? This kind of question ...

S-Lab, Alexis Wellwood "Back to basics: more is always _much-er"

• 11:30 Brief orientation session for new students with Grad Director Howard Lasnik, and Department Chair Bill Idsardi.

• 12:00 Lunch for everyone in department, along with introductions.

1108B Marie Mount Hall (the "large Seminar Room")

Alexis Wellwood and Cybelle Smith will be giving practice talks for their presentations at the Cognitive Science Society annual meeting, this August in Sapporo, Japan. The event should run 1.5 hours.

Development of medical techniques with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has increased our knowledge of voice production mechanisms in speech and singing. Our experience with high-resolution imaging techniques has also provided us new insights into physiological and acoustic aspects of voice production process. Physiologically, the larynx is under the control of the surrounding motor apparatus, and changes in voice fundamental frequency is dependent not only on the internal laryngeal functions but also on the external mechanisms ...

I consider two analyses of the syntax-semantics of cross-categorial constructions with more. The first view (held in the literature) posits that more is interpreted as a degree quantifier fed degrees by a heterogeneous collection of measure functions. The second view (the one I propose) interprets more as a functional relation between a degree and a measurement provided by a single measure function MUCH. A number of empirical and theoretical arguments are leveled to distinguish these ...

Recent studies show that by 11 months, language experience constrains infants¹ detection of audio-visual correspondences in non-native speech (Pons et al., 2009; Best et al., 2010, 2011). But what is it that they have learned about native AV relations, and how does it bias their responses to non-native speech? An array of theoretical views offer differing hypotheses. The Learned Association view posits that AV associations require experience to develop, i.e., should emerge in older ...

Day 1: 2:30-5pm -- Phases, a rough history (Norbert)

Day 2: 10-12:30pm -- Evidence for vP phases- Brad reviewing work by Rakowski and Richards (in the upstairs conference room)

Day 3: 2:30-5pm -- New views of phases part 1: Masa on Case and phases and Boskovic on phases

Day 4: 2:30-5pm -- Phase extension: Dustin on den Dikken approach

Day 5: 2:30-5pm -- Phases as spell out domains: Yuki on Fox and Pesestsky.

Presuppositions can produce what come across as inferential effects. An example is the following three-sentence discourse:

(1) ‘I gave the workers a generous tip. One thanked me. The other left without saying a word.’ (see [1])

This discourse seems to entail that the number of workers referred to in the first sentence was 2. This effect is quite systematic, as can be observed by varying the subject phrases of the second and third sentence of ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the Frames study for this semester.

Brad and Dave will discuss and seek input on some thoughts they've been working on concerning the nature of movement for Case/EPP reasons.

Mayfest is a workshop that brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines and perspectives to discuss fundamental issues in linguistics. Over the course of two days, participants engage in talks and discussion sessions to stimulate new insights and collaboration. This year's workshop will center on the role of computational modeling in developing theories of human language.

A key property of natural language is its ability to establish relationships between non-adjacent items in a sentence. For example, a verb must agree with its subject, though the two items may be separated by several words or phrases, as in The student(s) in the IGERT program eat(s) lunch every Thursday. Constructing these linguistic relations requires rapid access to the products of past analyses to integrate incoming material into a developing representation of ...

The Greeks used the concept, techne, to refer to crafts and skills that were associated with creation of reliably superior products. Later on this concept was extended to include categories of less reliable performance in law and medicine. Subsequent efforts to develop expertise promoted extended experience, acquisition of knowledge, general ability (talent) and advanced schooling. Consistent with this general view it is often assumed that 10 years of professional experience changes people into experts. Recent ...

Practice job talk

Developmental prosopagnosia is a neurodevelopmental condition characterized by severe face recognition deficits in the presence of intact low-level vision and intellect. The condition provides a unique window to investigate a range of issues in face processing. In my talk, I'll discuss studies investigating its cognitive, neural, and genetic basis.

Much work has documented children's comprehension difficulties with verbs of cognitive state--e.g. "think", "believe", "realize", "want", "say", etc. Adult-like representations of desire and communication verbs like "want" and "say" and belief state verbs like "think" do not appear to be present until 3 and 4 years of age, respectively (de Villiers 2005). One factor in this late-learning may be the nature of the evidence that children have at their disposal for learning these ...

We are discussing David Lewis' "General Semantics", 1970.

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the Puffin study for this semester.

In this talk I will review a variety of roles of inhibitory interactions and mechanisms in the auditory cortex. Receptive field differences exist between excitatory and inhibitory neurons that influence their mutual interactions. Excitatory and inhibitory neurons have distinct spatial pattern in relation to cortical functional organization. The development and plasticity of cortical receptive fields is strongly influenced by inhibitory influences and modulations. Finally, acute or chronic manipulations of inhibitory networks can lead to a ...

In this talk I explore how the semantic feature of animacy can help guide children's learning of certain abstract predicates, and lead them to figure out the syntactic structures associated with these predicates. More specifically, I show that encountering an inanimate subject in a biclausal structure provides a cue that the subject is displaced with respect to its theta-marked position. In turn, this tells the learner that the main predicate is what I'll ...

Categories in perception and classification exists in many domains, including artificial shape perception, color discrimination, and lexical categories of words. Sound perception is no different, and various types of sounds have been explored for the type of categoricity effects they elicit. When we consider two classic cases of Stop Consonants and Vowels, they differ in the extend to which they are perceived categorically. Categorical perception has been proposed for the very categorical stop consonants, while ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the 3rdMan study for this semester.

Many of you are familiar with the work that Wing Yee has presented in this area before -- on Friday she will be talking about possible future developments of the work, some of which she plans to run in China in the near future.

Early life experience potently shapes brain function and adult behavior. The biological bases underlying these windows of plasticity are increasingly being resolved in the developing mouse neocortex. This talk will cover core concepts of "critical periods" across sensory systems (visual, auditory, cross-modal). Pioneering the use of a molecular/genetic approach, we revealed that specific GABA circuits orchestrate the functional and structural rewiring of neural networks during sensory cortical development. Consequently, shifting excitatory-inhibitory (E-I) circuit balance ...

The problem of presupposition projection is the problem of relating the presuppositions of complex sentences to the presuppositions of their parts, in an application of the general principle of semantic compositionality. It has been agreed, ever since Karttunen's papers on the subject in the 1970s, that sentences do inherit the presuppositions of their parts, i.e. that presuppositions do project, but under certain quite complex conditions. But what is the form of the projection ...

How does human language comprehension achieve its hallmark ability to construct an unbounded range of compositional meanings from a finite (though large) set of individual words? My lab uses event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the neuro-cognitive processes serving on-line sentence comprehension. ERPs provide sensitivity to distinct neural processes with millisecond-level temporal resolution and a limited ability to resolve neuroanatomical sources. Recent findings in our lab and others’ indicate that semantic knowledge can drive combinatory ...

[Tydings Hall is the 3rd building to the west of MMH, after Woods and Key.]

Readers and listeners assign interpretations to text and speech moment-by-moment as soon as they perceive new input, rather than waiting until sentences unfold entirely to discern who is doing what to whom. Although efficient, processing language ‘on-the-fly’ can be costly: early interpretations sometimes turn out wrong when late-arriving input conflicts with one’s developing analysis. In this talk, I will ...

In this talk, I provide a new explanation for the well-known, cross-linguistically frequent phenomenon whereby anticausatives and reflexives are (or can be) expressed with the same morphology. I focus specifically on the role of the -st morpheme in the Icelandic sentences in (1) and (2).

(1) Rúðan splundraðist.
window.the shattered-ST
'The window shattered.' (anticausative)

(2) Bjartur tróðst gegnum mannþröngina.
Bjartur squeezed-ST through crowd.the
'Bjartur squeezed (himself) through the crowd.' (figure reflexive)

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the InstWM study for this semester.

We are discussing Katz & Fodor 1963, "The Structure of a Semantic Theory".

While the aim of language acquisition research is to describe the nature of the child's developing grammar, we face a challenge in that the grammar itself is not visible to us- we must rely on observable behavior. And further, children's behavior is not directly indicative of their grammatical knowledge, in two important ways. First, behavior is inherently a function of both a child's grammatical knowledge and the deployment processes required to implement ...

Humans may be unique among animals in our social motivations, for example in the extent to which we identify with and wish to align ourselves with our fellow group members. I show here that these social motivations are already present in infancy and early childhood. I present a series of studies on imitation, affiliation, and identification, which highlight young children’s connections with their social group and document their early preferential treatment of in- vs ...

Landau (2000, 2004) draws a distinction between P(artial) C(ontrol) and E(xhaustive) C(ontrol): whereas PC predicates like hope admit a subset relation between the controller and controllee, EC predicates like try do not. (e.g., Kim hoped to gather at noon. [controllee = Kim and contextually salient others] vs. *Kim tried to gather at noon.) This talk explores the consequences of Cinque’s (2006) suggestion that whereas PC instantiates ‘true’ biclausal control, EC ...

In Hindi-Urdu, T(ense) can agree with non-overtly case-marked subjects or objects. Despite being controlled by the same head and being sensitive to the same morphological properties of the agreement target, agreement inside conjunction structures reveals differences between subjects and objects: agreement with objects is sensitive to linear proximity, while agreement with subjects is not. This difference shows itself in two sets of conjunction structures: agreement with conjoined subjects and objects, and agreement in Right ...

Results from a study by Huang et al. (under review) suggest that preschoolers rely on a word's reference or semantic content when deciding whether to make early thematic role assignments in online processing. In this language acquisition lab meeting, we will discuss the design of a new study looking at how the referential and/or featural content of a word affects children's predictive assignment of thematic roles.

Bradley Larson will present work that will be presented later this month at the Chicago Linguistic Society's annual meeting.

The first annual PHLINC, or PHLING Colloquium, will bring together young researchers working on events in philosophy, linguistics and psychology. We aim to relate the discussion of events in these fields, bringing into conversation the work in ontology, logic, semantics, and perception. We will also have two invited speakers: Achille Varzi of Columbia University, and Paul Pietroski of the University of Maryland.

The problem of segmenting continuous speech is a great challenge for native and nonnative (L2) listeners alike. Speech signal, unlike the presence of gaps in written text, often do not contain breaks at word edges. Even when breaks occur in the form of pauses, they do not coincide with perceived word boundaries. Listeners can solve the segmentation problem by utilizing a variety of cues including lexical, acoustic, and prosodic cues. Language typology may influence the ...

Philosophy Colloquium
Robert Hanna, University of Colorado at Boulder

Abstract

As I will understand it, the analytic-synthetic distinction (or the A-S distinction for short) is the categorically sharp contrast between

1. truth in virtue of conceptual content, always taken together with some things in the world beyond conceptual content, although never in virtue of those worldly things (=analytic truth), and

2. truth in virtue of things in the world beyond conceptual content, always taken together with some ...

[This is Taliaferro Hall.]

Oral Examination for the Degree of PhD in Philosophy

This research proposes a unified approach to the semantics of the so-called bare nominals, which include proper names (e.g., 'Mary'), mass and plural terms (e.g., 'water', 'cats'), and articleless noun phrases in Japanese. I argue that bare nominals themselves are monadic predicates applicable to more than one particular, but they can constitute complex referential phrases when located within an appropriate ...

We are continuing on a whirlwind tour of "the classics", so reading and discussing Dowty's 1989 paper, "On the semantic content of the notion of 'thematic role'" this week.

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the MOST study for this semester, and then discussing extending Annie's model from our Friday discussion to this data.

ABSTRACT

Visual search problems are everywhere (especially if you happen to study visual search). First, I will give a rationale for why we have to search at all. Why isn’t “Where’s Waldo” just “There’s Waldo”. Then I will turn to research inspired by three real world search tasks.

1) Hybrid search: How long would it take you to determine that none of your 1000 Facebook friends were in this picture of 100 ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the Snail/Dragon study for this semester.

The notion of words is obscure and yet is supposedly one of the basic notions in theory of linguistics. When we ask what words are, we cannot get a definite answer like that a chemist could provide for the question “what is water”. We talk about words in various contexts of linguistic theories: in semantics we ask questions like “what does the word ‘definite’ mean?”, in acquisition we say the baby learned ten new words ...

Practice talk for CUNY.

We show that prenominal possessors block a "relative" interpretation of superlatives crosslinguistically. That is, whereas "Ty knows the tallest friends of Mary's" can mean that Ty knows the friends of Mary's that are tallest out of all of Mary's friends OR the group of Mary's friends that Ty knows is taller than any other group, "Ty knows Mary's tallest friends" is only compatible with the former interpretation (the "absolute" reading ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the Resultative study for this semester.

More than thirty years of research has examined “theory of mind” in non-human animals, human infants, children and adults, and human brains. This work has led to many insights, but, if anything, the object of study has become less clear as the weight of evidence has increased. By turns, researchers conceptualise “theory of mind” as a set of concepts, a collection of cognitive processes, and an individual difference variable. I shall argue that these conceptions ...

Join us in welcoming in prospective graduate students for the freshman class of 2012. Students will begin to arrive on Thursday March 8. On Friday March 9 there will be several events in the department, followed by a party in the evening.

Although there is substantive evidence of implicit learning (without intention or awareness) of form to form mappings in cognitive psychology, findings in the field of second language acquisition have been inconclusive. This study will investigate the possibility of adults acquiring a second language morphosyntactic rule implicitly. For the experiment, 75 adult native speakers of English without formal training in language sciences will be randomly assigned to one of three groups of 25, (two experimental and ...

Determiner sharing and non-constituent coordination are two relatively old, but relatively uninvestigated phenomena, especially within mainstream gen- erative syntax. The peculiarity of both phenomena has led to a number of interesting, but not entirely satisfactory, accounts; to date, no real account of determiner sharing exists, and the best accounts of non-constituent coor- dination come from the categorial theories. In this paper I will attempt to give a account of both that relies on nothing more ...

[Practice talk for GLOW]

Perhaps one of the most puzzling areas in syntax-semantics research concerns how sentences with comparative "more" are constructed and interpreted. I present a number of novel observations and generalizations, with an eye to understanding the roles of the lexicon and syntax in constraining the distribution of so-called "monotonic" versus "non-monotonic" scales. I consider how existing theories might be extended to (minimally) describe the new data, and propose an alternative aimed at better explaining it.

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at Julie's new study this semester.

We will be practicing for an upcoming Glow talk. Your feedback is very welcome!

Object agreement is the realization of valued phi features on v. Clitic doubling is the movement of a D head into the verbal inflectional complex. In principle, these two phenomena are distinct, but in practice it can be difficult to determine whether a given morpheme is the reflex of object agreement or a moved clitic. In this talk, I will take up the issue for the Amharic (Ethiosemitic) object marker, a morpheme attached to verbs ...

An abundance of evidence (much of it from research at UMD) suggests that sentence comprehension processes respect grammatical constraints in real time. That is, every stage of processing seems to be subject to the same constraints that we see in offline judgments. However, this surface-level similarity does not entail that there is a transparent mapping between the representations or computations invoked at the grammatical and algorithmic levels. For example, in a grammatical theory, a dependency ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, discussing the PRC study for this semester.

Language Acquisition lab meeting, reviewing a practice talk for the GURT conference

The production and the comprehension of syntactically complex sentences is impaired in aphasia. For example, both Wh-movement sentences (such as object-extracted relative clauses) and NP-movement sentences (such as passives) elicit chance performance by adults with aphasia in off-line comprehension tasks like sentence-picture matching. However, it remains unclear how exactly impaired adults try (and often fail) to comprehend such sentences in real time. This talk reviews evidence from a series of studies examining the real-time comprehension ...

The acquisition of attitude verbs has been a topic of interest to researchers in linguistics and psychology for many years. Attitude verbs are a subclass of verbs we use to talk about the contents of other people’s minds. There is a well-documented gap between two particular subclasses of attitude verbs: belief verbs and desire verbs. Many different studies have shown that children acquire the language of desire much sooner than that of belief. This ...

In recent years a number of problems in the brain and cognitive sciences have been addressed through statistical approaches, hypothesizing that humans and animals learn or adapt to their perceptual environments by tuning themselves to the statistics of incoming stimulation. Professor Newport will present her work on statistical language learning, showing that infants, young children, and adults can compute, online and with remarkable speed, how consistently sounds co-occur, how frequently words occur in similar contexts ...

Language Acquisition lab meeting, looking at the WH study for this semester.

The Mid-Atlantic Colloquium of Studies in Meaning brings together over 60 faculty and students from Washington to New York to share and develop new work in semantics and pragmatics, from theoretical, experimental, and philosophical perspectives. The University of Maryland hosts the Second MACSIM on Saturday, 18 February 2012, featuring Professor Roger Schwarzschild of Rutgers University as an invited speaker.

I argue that compositionality (in the sense of homomorphic interpretation) is compatible with radical and pervasive contextual effects on interpretation. Apparent problems with this claim lose their force if we are careful in distinguishing the question of how a grammar assigns interpretations from the question of how people figure out which interpretations the grammar assigns. I demonstrate, using a simple example, that this latter task must sometimes be done not by computing a derivation defined ...

We use experimental methodology to demonstrate from two separate domains (learning segmental phonology in Turkish and learning inflectional morphology in Romance) that not every pattern in a language, even if statistically robust or exceptionless, is actually learned by speakers: unnatural patterns are underlearned, suggesting that humans may bring formal and substantive biases to the task of forming grammatical generalisations.

I introduce hierarchical Bayesian modelling and illustrate its relation to traditional ideas in language acquisition. I show how a Bayesian model of phoneme learning can be constructed to solve the problem of learning in the presence of phonetic interference from adjacent segments or speaker-specific variability. It outperforms comparable models based on traditional ideas and is robust to various kinds of (interesting) noise. I then describe an experiment (currently running) which tests the predictions of this ...

We are discussing Gillian Ramchand's 2005 paper, "Post-Davidsonianism".

It is generally assumed that all displaced wh-elements have a syntactic dependency with a gap somewhere in the sentence. We propose that in coordinated wh-questions like "What and when did John eat?", only the right-conjoined wh-word ("when") participates in a standard wh-dependency. The left-conjoined wh-word ("what") is base-generated in its overt position and has no syntactic relationship with the verb. The dependency is established only at the semantic level. We present the results of two ...

Samoan is a Polynesian language with an ergative case marking system. While ergative and oblique case are marked segmentally, the absolutive case has been thought to be unmarked. I will present fieldwork data in Samoan supporting the hypothesis that absolutive case is marked by a lexical high tone, although this is not necessarily a one-to-one mapping, since high tones also mark other grammatical structures, as well as prosodic boundaries. I will discuss implications of this ...

Increasingly many findings suggest that the N400, long thought to reflect semantic processing, can be completely ‘blind’ to blatant semantic anomalies. For example, most studies of ‘role-reversed’ sentences such as “The fox.SUBJ the poacher.OBJ hunted” in verb-final constructions show that the verb elicits no N400 effect relative to the canonical word order control, despite the obvious anomaly. This kind of ‘dumb’ N400 has been taken to reflect a semantic illusion, and it contrasts ...

We will meet to discuss chapters 1 & 2 of Ann Bunger's (2006) dissertation, "How We Learn to Talk About Events: Linguistic and Conceptual Constraints on Verb Learning".

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at M.I.T., will be visiting the University of Maryland for two days, January 26-27, 2012, as a part of the Humanities Dean's Lecture Series.

On the morning of Friday January 27th Professor Chomsky is giving a specialist talk on linguistic theory.

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at M.I.T., will be visiting the University of Maryland for two days, January 26-27, 2012, as a part of the Humanities Dean's Lecture Series.

On the evening of Friday January 27 there will be a general talk on political issues at the Gildenhorn Recital Hall in the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor and Professor of Linguistics at M.I.T., will be visiting the University of Maryland for two days, January 26-27, 2012, as a part of the Humanities Dean's Lecture Series.

On the 26th, at 4:30pm, he will give a general talk on Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the Colony Ballroom in the Stamp Student Union.

Winter Storm is a FREE 2-week intensive training session covering material relevant to any researcher who works with language. It takes place on campus Monday through Friday from 10am - 5pm from January 9-15 and 17-20. Daily activities include morning seminars on programming and statistical processing in the R, guest speaker lunch presentations, reading groups, and professional development presentations in the afternoons.

All are welcome!

Cybelle will be practicing her talk, "Intonational cues to interrogative intent in African American Vernacular English", and Alexis will practicing hers, "When to quantify: syntactic cues in the acquisition of novel superlatives".

This week, we are discussing Liverence & Scholl, "Discrete Events as Units of Perceived Time", as well as planning for PHLINC in the spring.

Maryland folks will be visiting the NSF Science of Learning Center on Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) at Gallaudet University. This fall, they also have a brand new Brain and Language Lab (BL2) with fNIRS equipment. UMD students and faculty will have the chance to meet members of Gallaudet's departments of linguistics; psychology; hearing, speech, and language sciences; and interpretation.

This event is coordinated by Clifton Langdon, a Ph.D. student in linguistics ...

Joint work with Ilaria Frana, University of Goettingen

Heim (1979) famously observed that sentences like (1) are ambiguous:

(1) Miles knows the price that Clara knows.
    = Miles knows what the price of the iPhone is, and Clara does too. ("what value"/A reading.)
    = Miles knows which product Clara knows the price of. ("which concept"/B reading.)

Understanding this ambiguity and its consequences have been a central to understanding "concealed questions" and question-embedding verbs in general ...

Infants have been shown to develop expectations about the link between a word’s grammatical category and its likely meaning during the 2nd year of life (Waxman & Markow, 1995; Waxman & Booth, 2001), and their knowledge that verbs label event categories are acquired by 21‐months (Bernal et al, 2007). However, given previous studies that have shown infants’ sensitivity to the distributional features of the verb category by 15‐months (Peterson, 2006; Mintz, 2006), it is ...

My research has focused on the relationship between perception, cognition, and action control. It is commonly understood that we gather information from the environment and use it to intelligently guide our behaviors. My work has suggested that the control flows in the opposite direction as well; when we choose to engage in a particular type of behavior, our perceptual and cognitive systems change, in fundamental ways, to better mediate those actions. As the response demands ...

[Note on the location: the Benjamin Building is at the north end of the plaza it shares with Tawes and the Art-Sociology building, up the hill behind McKeldin, 700 yards from Marie Mount Hall.]

Adults, under ideal conditions (i.e., given unlimited time), evaluate which of two sets is "most" by counting up the objects in each and determining which has the higher count. So, does this mean that one must be able to count in order to understand "most"? Halberda et al 2008 set out to answer this question, and found that the answer is "no": some kids that can't count and even some that can evaluate ...

Researchers have argued that sound change may obtain when deviant percepts due to listeners' under-normalization for variation in speech become seeds for new perceptual and production norms (Ohala, 1993; Blevins, 2004). How deviant percepts accumulate in a systematic fashion to give rise to stable variation remains a vexing question. This study explores how variation in socio-cognitive processing may contribute to the emergence and propagation of sound change, showing that variations in several individual-difference cognitive dimensions ...

[Computational Psycholinguistics Lab Meeting] Role-reversed sentences (e.g., The thief arrested the cop) describe thematic relations that are unexpected given our world knowledge. I will review existing works that model how our knowledge (prior belief) affects how we process bottom-up information, and propose a way to extend existing models to study the processing of role-reversed sentences.

To celebrate the end of the semester, we will be having a DEBATE. Topic: "Retrieval in parsing anaphora: interference (never) helps"

In the blue corner: Shevaun Lewis & Wing Yee Chow. A fearsome pairing, they have been preparing by co-teaching a psycholinguistics seminar. They can complete an eye-tracking experiment in two days, and cook Thanksgiving dinner for 50 people even faster. Few dare to challenge them.

In the red corner: Dan Parker & Sol Lago. The young ...

A growing literature shows that children are highly sensitive to statistical features of their linguistic input (Saffran et al 1996; Gomez & Gerken 2000). This literature assumes that children can reliably encode all of the information available in this input, contrasting with the observation that children are sometimes sensitive to features of their language out of proportion with their statistical reliability. This contrast highlights the difference between the input, the linguistic information available in the environment ...

This thesis will be examining reflexive pronouns that can take antecedents outside of their immediate clause. I argue that such pronouns are related to their antecedents by sisterhood, followed by movement of the antecedent.

We will discuss Loucks and Pederson's "Linguistic and non-linguistic categorization of complex motion events", from the book Event Representations in Language and Cognition, Cambridge UP.

Syntax Lab

There are two main sources of variability in natural languages: sociolinguistic (probabilistic) variability and parametric variation. Although sociolinguistic variation has long been recognized as an integral part of the linguistic system, its impact on the acquisition of grammar has barely been explored. We present experimental data from Chilean Spanish (ChS) and Brazilian Portuguese (BrP), two languages in which there is significant sociolinguistic variation in the production of plural morphology but which also differ parametrically in ...

Third of three Baggett Lectures

The Shoemaker Building is 250 yards southwest of Marie Mount Hall, at the western edge of Parking Lot Y.

Abstract

How does a community create and maintain a language? And how does an individual learn a language? These are both hard problems; but the goal of this lecture will be to persuade you that they are connected in ways that can make them easier to solve together than separately. I ...

Wing Yee Chow will talk about "The Smart N400, and the Dumb N400", and about how she can turn one into the other.

Speakers are usually quite accurate and fluent when speaking, but we all make errors. While these speech errors have been a rich source of data on the mechanisms of language production, less is known about the consequences of these errors for our listeners. This is largely because most research on comprehension focuses on "ideal delivery" utterances; that is, comprehension of language that is error- and disfluency-free. I will discuss some work-in-progress investigating what happens to ...

Second of three Baggett Lectures

The Shoemaker Building is 250 yards southwest of Marie Mount Hall, at the western edge of Parking Lot Y.

Abstract

Three developments are creating an extraordinary range of near-term opportunities. First, algorithms for many kinds of automatic speech and language analysis have passed the threshold of usability; second, more and more of our personal, social, and economic life flows through digital networks that are subject to computational analysis; and third ...

Professor Mark Liberman (Christopher H. Browne Disinguished Professor of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania) will be giving a series of three lectures, generously supported by Dave Baggett:

1. The Linguistic Culture Wars

   November 16, 4-6pm, Maryland Room, Marie Mount Hall

2. The Coming Golden Age of Speech and Language Science

   November 17, 4-6pm, 2102 Shoemaker

3. Language Learning as Language Creation, and Vice Versa

   November 18, 10-12noon, 2102 Shoemaker

Directions to linguistics events are here.

First of three Baggett Lectures

Directions to Marie Mount Hall.

Abstract

In the preface to Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw noted that “It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman hate or despise him." Americans, Australians, and Canadians are full partners today in the network of negativity; and writing is at least as likely as speech to provoke the haters, who are often strongly motivated to share their reactions ...

Syntax Lab

A theory of consciousness must specify which mental states can be conscious and the conditions under which they become conscious. Recent research in psychology and neuroscience can settle both of these questions. Evidence strongly suggests that consciousness arises at a specific stage of processing in our perceptual systems, and it arises when and only when we are paying attention. Developing these proposals requires an account of what attention is, both psychologically and biologically. The talk ...

Reading and discussing Ursini's (2011) "Space and the Vision–Language Interface: A Model-Theoretic Approach".

Syntax Lab

On the 4th, we will be meeting in the CNL lunch room/conference room to read Wu and Bodomo's response to Cheng and Sybesma's work, "Classifiers ≠ Determiners", arguing against the (supposed?) semantic/distributional motivation for claiming classifier languages have a ClP as a maximal projection in the nominal domain, and not a DP.

In recent years, moral psychologists have attempted to answer two big questions: What are the respective roles of intuition and reasoning in moral judgment? Are moral judgments made by a dedicated moral faculty, or by one or more domain-general processes? The dual-process theory of moral judgment, now a decade old, is an answer to the first question. I’ll provide an overview and update on the evidence supporting it. The dual-process theory, by explaining moral ...

Adult native speakers have a vast amount of knowledge (e.g., lexical, grammatical, pragmatic) of their first language, most of which is automatic, implicit, unverbalisable in nature. In contrast, L2 learners, as opposed to native speakers, rely more heavily on metalinguistic (Krashen, 1982), explicit, declarative (Ullman, 2004), less integrated (Jiang, 2007), less automatized (Segalowitz, 2003) knowledge and require more time, deliberate effort and conscious awareness to access and retrieve it. In my talk, I will ...

The last of three lectures by Professor Mamoru Saito, of Nanzan University.

Location of AV Williams

Abstract

We learn how the words of a language are inflected, given a plain text corpus plus a small supervised set of known paradigms. The approach is principled, simply performing empirical Bayesian inference under a straightforward generative model that explicitly describes the generation of:

1. The grammar and subregularities of the language ...

The second of three lectures by Professor Mamoru Saito, of Nanzan University. The last lecture is on November 2, at 1:30, in the same location.

The first of three lectures by Professor Mamoru Saito, of Nanzan University. The next two are on November 1 (11:30) and 2 (1:30). All are in the same location.

Appalachian English exhibits sentences that seem to contain two subjects, as in (1), which are not possible in standard English:

(1) a. We don’t nobody know how long we have. (Montgomery and Hall 2004)

b. ... they didn' nobody live up there. (our fieldwork)

c. There can't nobody ride him. (Montgomery and Hall 2004)

d. ... there wouldn' nothin' go down through there. (Feagin 1979, 238)

Our investigation of these types of (split subject) sentences ...

People are remarkably good at acquiring complex knowledge from limited data, as is required in learning causal relationships, categories, or aspects of language. Successfully solving inductive problems of this kind requires having good "inductive biases" -- constraints that guide inductive inference. Viewed abstractly, understanding human learning requires identifying these inductive biases and exploring their origins. I will argue that probabilistic models of cognition provide a framework that can facilitate this project, giving a transparent characterization of ...

In our models of grammatical knowledge, words play an important role. They are phonological atoms, influence the surrounding syntactic structure, and provide the criteria for evaluating that sentence's truth conditions. However, as linguistic theory has advanced, particularly in investigating the structures of polysynthetic/agglutinative languages, the primacy of words as the atoms of grammar has been scrutinized. Theories of grammar must have some notion of morphosyntax -- building complex words out of sublexical units. However ...

Syntax Lab: Dustin Chacon

Pragmatic interpretations can be rapid and robust but are language-dependent inferences like scalar implicature preceded by semantic analysis? While many studies find an initial period of semantic interpretation (e.g., some interpreted as “some-and-possibly-all”), recent work has found that scalar implicatures are rapidly calculated when the quantifier was phonologically-reduced, providing a cue to the partitive construction (e.g., summa instead of some-of). This talk will examine possible reasons for this dichotomy. To distinguish between the ...

Beyond features such as color and shape, visual percepts can also involve properties that we typically associate with higher-level cognition -- such as animacy, intentionality, and goal-directedness. Cognitive scientists have long been captivated by such phenomena, but have faced challenges in studying them with precision, and in distinguishing true perceptual effects from higher-level inferences. I will describe and demonstrate several projects from our group that address these challenges, exploring the perception of animacy from some new ...

We will be having a Thursday episode of the DPP this week. As a follow up to our discussion about the parameters underlying classifier languages from non-classifier languages and the discussion between Tang and Cheng and Sybesma about the "ClP Hypothesis", Dustin will be giving a practice talk for a CUNY Syntax Supper presentation. The claim is that there are observed head movement operations in the Bangla DP whose feeding and bleeding relationships show that ...

This talk is in honor of the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award, awarded to Professor Colin Phillips.

Infants learn to segment words from fluent speech during the same period as they learn the sounds of their native language, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which sounds appear. This talk presents computational and empirical work testing the hypothesis that the words infants segment from fluent speech provide a useful cue for learning about phonetic categories. Computational models illustrate how words can help an ideal learner acquire ...

[Note on the location: the Benjamin Building is at the north end of the plaza it shares with Tawes and the Art-Sociology building, up the hill behind McKeldin, 700 yards from Marie Mount Hall.]

We are reading the chapter "Event Semantics" written by Barry Schein, forthcoming in the Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Language. This will hopefully directly engage the (implicit or explicit) thoughts we've been having on "how many event variables there are" per clause, and the nature of the relevant thematic relations. For the first hour of our meeting, Alexander Williams will be there to clarify any issues we have with Barry's treatment, and raise ...

Please join us for summer research presentations of work conducted by undergraduate recipients of the Summer Baggett Scholarship. Listen to great research and chat with David Baggett, founder of the scholarship and UMD alum, all while munching on delicious dessert morsels.

The undergraduate students who will be presenting their work this year (and their faculty advisors) are:

Jacqueline Phillips (Jeffrey Lidz) Faina Kostyukovsky (Jeffrey Lidz and Valentine Hacquard) Jessica Lee (Jeffrey Lidz) Victoria Peck (Jeffrey ...

Please join us for six presentations given by undergraduate linguistics majors, summarizing the results of their summer (and on-going) research projects.

The Baggett Summer Scholarships are given to selected students to work as research assistants with faculty and graduate student mentors during the summer. They are generously funded by UMD Alum Dave Baggett (who was a Linguistics-Computer Science double major and who will join us for the presentations). We are happy to have Mr Baggett ...

Historically treatments of the mind have taken a third person perspective that has led to significant conceptual, methodological, and epistemological oversights. This talk will explore insights that can be gained when the mind is considered from a first person (i.e inside out) perspective. Methodologically, such an approach leads to the development and refinement of self report measures that when triangulated with behavioral and neuro-cognitive measures can provide valid insight into internal mental states. Conceptually ...

We will discuss Paul Pietroski's 1998 Mind article, "Actions, Adjuncts, and Agency".