Memory and Locality in Natural Language
Monthly Archives: September 2017
Film Screening and Discussion (9/21/2017): “We Still Live Here – Âs Nutayuneân”
Thursday, September 21, 2017 5:00pm – 7:00pm
Smith-Buonanno Hall, Room 106, 95 Cushing Street, Providence RI
We Still Live Here, a documentary by award-winning filmmaker Anne Makepeace, tells the story of the return of the Wampanoag language. The film interweaves the present-day story Wampanoags reclaiming their language with historical events that silenced the language for more than a century and obliterated much of their culture – epidemics, missionary pressures, land loss, and the indenture of Native children.
A discussion with Jennifer Weston ’97, Brown alumni and the film’s co-producer, will follow the screening. Weston is the Immersion School Developer & Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Language Department Director for the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project. She will talk about her work on the film and her ongoing involvement in language revitalization with indigenous nations of North America.
Free and open to the public. Reception to follow.
More details about the speaker and the event can be found here.
AY 2017-2018 Speaker Schedule
Fall 2017
Date | Speaker | Title |
9/6/2017 | – | LLL(Lite) |
9/13/2017 | Iris Berent (Northeastern University) | Colloquium – On the origins of phonology |
9/20/2017 | Shiying Yang (Brown) | FYP/QP Practice Talk – On the distinctiveness of Mandarin syllable and monosyllabic word contrasts |
9/27/2017 | Richard Futrell (MIT) | Memory and Locality in Natural Language |
10/18/2017 | A’ingae Documentation Team (Brown) | LLL(Lite) – UTRA Presentation + CILLA VIII Practice Talk |
10/25/2017 | – | LLL(Lite) – A Conversation with Faculty |
11/1/2017 | Laura Janda (UiT) | What happens to a language under pressure: discriminatory language policy and language change in North Saami |
11/10/2017 | (FRI) Hadas Kotek (NYU) | Which QuD |
11/15/2017 | Florian Schwarz (UPenn) | Colloquium – The Time-course of Presupposition Projection – Experimental Data and Theoretical Issues |
11/29/2017 | Gale Goodwin Gomez (RIC) | TBA |
12/6/2017 | Junwen Lee (Brown) | LLL(Lite) – Dissertation Research Presentation |
Spring 2018
Date | Speaker | Title |
2/14/2018 | – | LLL(Lite) |
2/21/2018 | ||
2/28/2018 | Roey Gafter (Ben Gurion University) | Pharyngeals and beyond: phonetic differences and phonemic mergers in Hebrew (![]() |
3/7/2018 | Kasia Hitczenko(University of Maryland) | How to use context to disambiguate overlapping categories: The test case of Japanese vowel length |
3/14/2018 | Susan Kalt (Roxbury Community College) | Changes in Bolivian Quechua evidentiality |
3/21/2018 | Gale Goodwin Gomez (RIC) | CANCELLED |
4/4/2017 | Meghan Armstrong-Abrami (UMass) | Children’s detection of epistemic strength distinctions through prosody and the lexicon (![]() |
4/11/2018 | Angela Carpenter (Wellesley College) | Dialect change in immigrant speakers of Jamaican Creole |
4/18/2018 | Yiming Gu (Brown University) | Tone sandhi in Ganyu Mandarin |
4/25/2018 | Haoru Zhang (Brown University) | Phonetic Convergence in Mandarin |
5/2/2018 | Sandra Waxman (Northwestern University) | Colloquium – Becoming human: How (and how early) do infants link language and cognition? |
New paper published by Cohen Priva et al.: Converging to the baseline: Corpus evidence for convergence in speech rate to interlocutor’s baseline. (J Acoust Soc Am. 141(5): 2989)
Congratulations to Uriel, Emily, and Lee for a paper published recently in the Journal of the Acoustic Society of America! The title and abstract are as follows:
Speakers have been shown to alter their speech to resemble that of their conversational partner. Do speakers converge with their interlocutor’s baseline, or does convergence stem from conversational properties that similarly affect both parties? Using the Switchboard corpus, this paper shows evidence for speakers’ convergence in speech rate to the other party’s baseline, not only to conversation-specific properties. Study 1 shows that the method for calculating speech rate used in this paper is powerful enough to replicate established findings. Study 2 demonstrates that speakers are mostly affected by their own behavior in other contexts, but that they also converge to their interlocutor’s baseline, established using the interlocutor’s behavior in other contexts. Study 2 also shows that speakers change their speech rate in response to the interlocutor’s characteristics: speakers speak more slowly with older speakers regardless of the interlocutor’s speech rate, and male speakers speak faster with other male speakers.
The full paper can be found here.
Richard B. Millward Colloquium (9/13/2017): Iris Berent (Northeastern University)
On the origins of phonology