Date | Speaker | Title |
1/22/2020 | – | First day of classes |
1/29/2020 | Joanna Morris (Hampshire College & RISD) | Is there a ‘moth’ in mother? How we read complex words (and those that are just pretending to be) |
2/5/2020 | – | – |
2/12/2020 | – | – |
2/19/2020 | Maksymilian Dabkowski (Brown) | The morphophonology of A’ingae verbal stress |
2/26/2020 | Casey Lew-Williams (Princeton) | Infants learn from meaningful structure in their communicative environments |
3/4/2020 | Masoud Jasbi (Harvard) | The Puzzle of Learning Disjunction |
3/11/2020 | Lauren Franklin (Brown) | TBD |
3/17/2020 | Rachel Burdin (University of New Hampshire) CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19 | TBD |
3/25/2020 | Spring Recess | – |
4/1/2020 | Athulya Aravind (MIT) CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19 | TBD |
4/8/2020 | Shiying Yang (Brown) CANCELLED DUE TO COVID-19 | TBD |
4/15/2020 | – | – |
4/22/2020 | Youtao Lu (Brown) | TBD |
4/29/2020 | Misha Ali (Brown) TBD | TBD |
Monthly Archives: January 2020
LingLang Lunch (1/29/2020): Joanna Morris (Hampshire College & RISD)
Is there a ‘moth’ in mother? How we read complex words (and those that are just pretending to be).
Skilled readers identify words with remarkable speed and accuracy, and fluent word identification is a prerequisite for comprehending sentences and longer texts. Although research on word reading has tended to focus on simple words, models of word recognition must nevertheless also be able to account for complex words with multiple parts or morphemes. One theory of word reading is that we break complex words into their component parts depending on whether the meaning of the whole word can be figured out from its components. For example, a ‘pay-ment’ is something (the ‘-ment’ part) that is paid ( the ‘pay-’ part); a ‘ship-ment’ is something that is shipped. However a ‘depart-ment’ is not something that departs! Thus ‘payment’ and ‘shipment’ are semantically transparent, while ‘department’ is semantically opaque. One model of word reading holds that only semantically transparent words are broken down. Other models claim that not only are all complex words —both transparent and opaque—decomposed, but so are words that are not even really complex but only appear to be, i.e. pseudo-complex words such as ‘mother’. My research examines the circumstances under which we break complex words into their component parts and in this talk I will address how this process may be instantiated in the brain.
Brown at the LSA
There are several presentations by Brown students and faculty in this year’s annual meeting for the Linguistic Society of America. Come and meet us!
- Uriel Cohen Priva, Shiying Yang, and Emily Strand will present their talk on The stability of segmental properties across genre and corpus types in low-resource languages. Thursday, 5 pm, at the Kabacoff room.
- Ellie Pavlick will talk about What Should Constitute Natural Language “Understanding”? as an invited speaker of this year’s SCiL (Society of Computation in Linguistics). Friday, 11 am, at the Kabacoff room
- Uriel Cohen Priva will present his poster American English vowels do not reduce to schwa: A corpus study. Friday Morning Plenary Poster Session.
- Roman Feiman will be a discuss Conceptual and linguistic components of early negation comprehension at Perspectives on Negation: A Cross-Disciplinary Discussion workshop. Saturday, 2:55 pm at Chart B.
- Uriel Cohen Priva and Emily Gleason will present Increased intensity is mediated by reduced duration in variable consonant lenition. on Saturday, 2 pm at Camp
- Youtao Lu and James Morgan will present Homophone auditory processing in cross-linguistic perspective on Sunday, 11:30 am at Jackson.