Category Archives: Schedules

Spring 2020 Schedule

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

Fall 2019 Speaker Schedule

Date Speaker Title
9/4/2019 – First day of classes
9/11/2019
9/18/2019 Stefan Kaufmann (UConn) How fake is fake Past?
9/25/2019 – –
10/2/2019 Lisa Davidson (NYU) The link between syllabic nasals and glottal stops in American English
10/9/2019
10/16/2019 Jeff Mielke (NC State) Phonetic studies of vowels in two endangered languages
10/23/2019 Uriel Cohen Priva (Brown) Understanding lenition through its causal structure
10/30/2019 Joshua Hartshorne (Boston College) Critical periods in language, cognitive development, and massive online experiments
11/7/2019 (Thursday at 10am) Judith Kroll (UC Irvine) The fate of the native language in second language learning: A new hypothesis about bilingualism, mind, and brain
11/13/2019 Kate Lindsey (BU) (cancelled) TBD
11/20/2019 Daniel Altshuler (Hampshire College) Causal reasoning about states
11/27/2019 – Thanksgiving recess
12/4/2019 Roman Feiman (Roman) TBD

Spring 2019 Speaker Schedule

Date Speaker Title
1/23/2019 – First day of classes
1/31/2019
2/7/2019 Ellie Pavlick (Brown) Why should NLP care about linguistics?
2/14/2019
2/21/2019
2/28/2019 Chelsea Sanker (Brown) Secondary cues to coda voicing and vowel duration
3/7/2019
3/15/2019 Suzi Lima (Toronto) A typology of the count/mass distinction in Brazil and its relevance for count/mass theories
3/21/2019 Jason Shaw (Yale) Phonological control of time
3/28/2019 – Spring Recess
4/4/2019 Jessi Grieser (The University of Tennessee Knoxville) Talking Place, Speaking Race
4/11/2019 Roger Levy (MIT) Implicit gender bias in preferred linguistic descriptions for expected events
4/18/2019
4/25/2019 Anna Bjurman Pautz (Brown University) Two-dimensionalism and Empty names in Propositional Attitude reports
5/2/2019 Lynnette Arnold & Paja Faudree Language and Social Justice: Teaching About the “Word Gap”

Fall 2018 Speaker Schedule

Date Speaker Title
9/5/2018 – First day of classes
9/12/2018
9/19/2018
9/26/2018 Mirjam Fried (Charles University in Prague) When main clauses go AWOL: a constructional account of polarity shifts in insubordination
10/3/2018
10/10/2018
10/17/2018
10/24/2018 Kyuwon Moon Feminine voice in workplace: phonetic variation in Seoul women’s speech
10/31/2018 (Susan Goldin-Meadow Colloquium)
11/7/2018 Scott Seyfarth (Ohio State University) Variable external sandhi in a communication-oriented phonology
11/14/2018
11/21/2018 Thanksgiving (university closed)
11/28/2018 Steven Frankland (Princeton University) Structured re-use of neural representations in language and thought
12/5/2018

AY 2012-2013 Speaker Schedule

 

Fall 2012

Date Speaker Title
10/17/2012 Polly Jacobson (Brown University) The Myth of Silent Linguistic Material
9/25/2012 Geoffrey K. Pullum (University of Edinburgh) Psychology and the Claimed Infinitude of Sentences
10/10/2012 Junwen Lee (Brown University) A Unitary Analysis of Colloquial Singapore English Lah
10/17/2012 Eugene Charniak (Brown University) Colloquium – Bayes’ Law as Psychologically Real
10/24/2012 D.R. (Bob) Ladd (University of Edinburgh) Colloquium – Individual differences in pitch perception and a possible link to language typology
10/31/2012 Peter Graff (MIT) Communicative Efficiency in the Lexicon
11/1/2012 Terry Au (University of Hong Kong) Colloquium – Access to Childhood Language Memory
11/14/2012 Brian Dillon (University of Massachusetts Amherst) Syntactic complexity across the at-issue / not-at-issue divide
11/28/2012 Stefan Kaufmann (Northwestern University)
 

Spring 2013

Date Speaker Title
2/6/2013 Uriel Cohen Priva (Brown University) (CANCELLED)
4/24/2013 Jill Thorson (Brown University) TBA
4/17/2013 Victor Ferreira (University of California, San Diego TBA
5/2/2013 Philip Miller (Université Paris Diderot) Verb Phrase Ellipsis and Pseudogapping: From Discourse to Syntax
5/8/2013 Kathryn Davidson (University of Connecticut) What can sign languages tell us about the semantic/pragmatic interface?
5/15/2013 Neal Fox (Brown University) Sentential context effects on phonetics of speech production

AY 2013-2014 Speaker Schedule

 

Fall 2013

Date Speaker Title
9/18/2013 Eva Wittenberg (Tufts University) Close but no cigar: The differences between kissing, giving kisses, and giving other things
10/2/2013 Josh Hartshorne (MIT) Syntax, Semantics, World Knowledge, and Reference
10/15/2013 Scott AnderBois (Brown University) A transitivity-based split in Yucatec Maya control complements
10/29/2013 Scott AnderBois (Brown University) On the exceptional status of reportative evidentials
11/13/2013 Kevin Ryan (Harvard University) Prosodic weight beyond the rime
12/10/2013 Anna Shusterman (Wesleyan University) (CANCELLED) Language-Thought Interactions in Development
12/17/2013 Laura Kertz & Corey Cusimano (Brown University) (CANCELLED) Coherence-driven expectations for cross-clausal parallelism
 

Spring 2014

Date Speaker Title
1/29/2014 Anna Shusterman (Wesleyan University) Language-Thought Interactions in Development
2/12/2014 Sohini Ramachandran (Brown University) A geneticist’s approach to comparing global patterns of genetic and phonemic variation
2/19/2014 Nathaniel Smith (University of Edinburgh) Building a Bayesian bridge between the physics and the phenomenology of social interaction
2/26/2014 Jeff Runner (University of Rochester) Binding constraints on processing: pronouns are harder than reflexives
3/12/2014 Livia Polanyi (Stanford University) Step-wise Discourse Topic Construction
3/19/2014 Shiri Lev Ari (Max Planck Institute, Nijmegen) How expectations influence language processing, and their cognitive and social consequences: The case of processing the language of non-native speakers
4/2/2014 Sheila Blumstein (Brown University) Variability and Invariance in Speech and Lexical Processing: Evidence from Aphasia and Functional Neuroimaging
4/9/2014 Kyle Rawlins (Johns Hopkins University) ‘About’ attitudes
4/16/2014 Lee Edelist (Brown University) Pronoun resolution in multi utterance discourse
4/30/2014 Jill Thorson (Brown University) How intonation interacts with new and given information to guide attention

AY 2014-2015 Speaker Schedule

 

Fall 2014

Date Speaker Title
9/24/2014 – Introductory Meeting
10/1/2014 Sara Guediche (Brown University) Flexible and adaptive processes in speech perception
10/22/2014 Masako Fidler (Brown University) Mining reader receptions of text with keyword analysis
10/29/2014 Sophia Malamud (Brandeis University) Utterance modifiers and the emergence of illocutionary force
11/5/2014 Chigusa Kurumada (University of Rochester) Expectation-adaptation in the incremental interpretation of English contrastive prosody
11/19/2014 Scott AnderBois (Brown University) The discourse particle wal in Yucatec Maya: a decompositional approach
12/10/2014 Stefanie Tellex (Brown University) Natural Language and Robotics
 

Spring 2015

Date Speaker Title
2/4/2015 Philip Hofmeister (Brown University) Expectations and linguistic acceptability judgments
2/25/2015 Timothy Grinsell (University of Chicago) Verdicts, Voters, and Vectors: Three Sources of Evidence for One Theory of Vagueness
3/4/2015 Tania Rojas-Esponda (Stanford University) Discourse particles and focus effects in a question-under-discussion framework
3/18/2015 Václav Cvrček (Institute of the Czech National Corpus) Descriptive vs prescriptive approach. The case of Czech grammar
4/1/2015 Junwen Lee (Brown University) Lah revisited – A modal analysis
4/8/2015 Magdalena Kaufmann (University of Connecticut) Free choice as a form of dependence
4/22/2015 Ryan Bennett (Yale University) An ultrasound study of Irish palatalization
4/29/2015 Gregory Hickok (University of California, Irvine) Colloquium – An Integrative Approach to Understanding the Neuroscience of Language
4/30/2015 Eladio Mateo Toledo (B’alam) (CIESAS-Sureste, México) The Destinative Construction in Q’anjob’al (Maya)

AY 2015-2016 Speaker Schedule

 

Fall 2015

Date Speaker Title
9/9/2015 Boaz Keysar (University of Chicago) Colloquium – Living in a Foreign Tongue
9/16/2015 Edward Gibson (MIT) Colloquium – Information theoretic approaches to language universals
9/30/2015 Matt Hall (University of Connecticut) Using Non-Language to Understand Language
10/7/2015 Stephen Emet (Brown University) “I’m sorry I ever went to that talk”: NPIs in Affective Contexts
10/21/2015 Polly Jacobson (Brown University) You think there’s Silent Linguistic Material, but I don’t: Neg Raising meets Ellipsis
11/4/2015 Matt Hall (University of Connecticut) Keeping the hands in mind: Executive function and implicit learning in deaf children
11/11/2015 Evelina Fedorenko (Mass General Hospital/Harvard Medical School) Colloquium – The L​anguage ​N​etwork and ​I​ts ​P​lace within ​t​he ​B​roader Architecture of the Human Mind and Brain
11/18/2015 Robert J. Podesva (Stanford University) Colloquium – The Role of the Body in Structuring Sociophonetic Variation
12/2/2015 Wilson Silva (RIT) The Desano Language Documentation Project: Fieldwork, Theory and Language Revitalization
 

Spring 2016

Date Speaker Title
2/24/2016 Peter Klecha (University of Connecticut) Regulating Loose Talk through Implicature
3/2/2016 Peter Alrenga (Boston University) (CANCELLED) At least and at most: Ignorance and variation in focus
3/9/2016 Emily Myers (University of Connecticut) Non-Native Speech Sound Learning: Studies of Sleep, Brain, and Behavior
3/23/2016 Jean E. Fox Tree (University of California, Santa Cruz) Colloquium – The Usefulness of Useless Utterances: Why Um, Like, and Other Disparaged Phenomena are not Superfluous
4/6/2016 Matthew Barros (Yale University) Sluicing and Ellipsis Identity
4/20/2016 Eiling Yee (University of Connecticut) Putting Concepts in Context
4/29/2016 Florian Jaeger (University of Rochester) From processing to language change and cross-linguistic distributions

AY 2016-2017 Speaker Schedule

 

Fall 2016

Date Speaker Title
9/28/2016 Andy Wedel (University of Arizona) Functional pressure from the lexicon shapes phoneme inventory evolution
10/5/2016 – LLL(Lite) – Lightning Talks
10/19/2016 Matt Masapollo (Brown University) On the nature of the natural referent vowel bias
10/26/2016 Seth Cable (University of Massachusetts Amherst) (CANCELLED) Negation and Antonym in Tlingit
11/2/2016 Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland) Colloquium – Grasping at Factivity
11/9/2016 Chelsea Sanker (Brown University) Phonetic Convergence across measures and across speakers
11/16/2016 Uriel Cohen Priva (Brown University) An interplay between information, duration, and lenition
11/23/2016
12/1/2016 Peter Alrenga (Boston University) At least and at most: Ignorance and variation in focus
12/7/2016 Gerry Altman (University of Connecticut) Colloquium – The challenges of event cognition: Object representation at the interface of episodic and semantic memory
 

Spring 2017

Date Speaker Title
1/25/2017 – LLL(Lite)
2/1/2017 Maria Piñango (Yale) Eventive iteration construal during real-time comprehension, its neurological underpinnings and the grammar-meaning connection
2/8/2017 Youtao Lu, Elena Luchkina (Brown) LLL(Lite) Student Presentations ([ ])
2/15/2017 Sudha Arunachalam (Boston
University)		 Informativeness and processing cost in verb acquisition: Evidence from typical language development and autism spectrum disorder ([ ])
2/22/2017 Seth Cable (UMass Amherst) Negation and Antonymy in Tlingit ([ ])
3/1/2017 Steve Emet (Brown) I just think… : the meaning of just and its role in discourse ([ ])
3/8/2017 Kevin Tang (Yale) Experience and expectation predict fine details of perception and production
4/12/2017 Annemarie Kocab (Harvard) Language Emergence: Evidence from Nicaraguan Sign Language
4/19/2017 Kristine Yu (UMass Amherst) Parsing with prosody: towards a computational model of prosodically-informed syntactic parsing in Samoan ([ ])
4/26/2017 Jon Gajewski (University of
Connecticut)		 It’s not syntax, I don’t think: Neg-raising and parentheticals
5/3/2017 Scott AnderBois (Brown) LLL(Lite) – An illocutionary account of reportative evidentials in imperatives

Spring 2018 Speaker Schedule

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?