Monthly Archives: February 2015

Schedule for Cognitive Brown Bag announced

The schedule for this semester’s Cognitive Brown Bag series (chaired by Jeff Starns), held at noon in Tobin 521, has been announced.

2/4 : Mara Breen
2/11 : Patrick Sadil
2/18 : Brian Dillon
2/25 : Greg Cox (Syracuse postdoc)
3/4 : David Ross
3/11 :
3/25 : Will Hopper
4/1 : Josh Levy
4/8 : Tina Chen
4/15 : Ben Zobel
4/29 : 1st year cog psych projects

Legate in Linguistics Friday 2/6 at 3:30

Julie Legate of the University of Pennsylvania will present “Restrictive Phi in a Partial Typology of Noncanonical Passives” in the Department of Linguistics colloquium series in ILC N400 Friday at 3:30. An abstract is below.

Abstract: In this talk, I investigate the syntactic structure of noncanonical
passives, focusing on the role played by phi-features that restrict rather
than saturate the external argument position.  Building on previous work by
myself and others, I show that voice is encoded in a functional projection,
VoiceP, which is distinct from, and higher than, vP.  I demonstrate that
microvariations in the properties of VoiceP and in the location of
restrictive phi-features explain a wide range of noncanonical passives,
including agent-agreeing passives, restricted agent passives, accusative
object passives, impersonals, and object voice. The analysis draws on data
from a typologically diverse set of languages.

Kisseberth in Linguistics Weds. 2/4 at 12:15

From Lisa Selkirk: Pioneering phonologist and pioneer in the study of the syntactic conditioning of tonal and segmental phenomena in the sentence in Bantu languages, Chuck Kisseberth will give a talk on Prosody, Phonological Phrasing, and Focus in Chimiini next Wednesday in Kristine Yu’s Phonological Theory class in Room N-458 in the ILC.  For more information about Kisseberth, please consult http://www.linguistics.illinois.edu/people/ckissebe.

In order to provide a normal length time slot for a talk of this sort, it will get an early start at 12:15 (instead of 12:20). The main presentation will last roughly an hour, until 1:15, and there will be a half an hour for discussion, ending at roughly 1:45.  Given the constraints of normal class schedules and the unusual time slot, it’s understandable that people may have to leave during the discussion session after the talk. Feel free to bring your lunch to the talk.

Breen at Cognitive Brown Bag Weds. 2/4 at noon

Mara Breen of Mt. Holyoke College will be presenting Rhythmic context affects syntactic ambiguity resolution in listening and reading in the Cognitive Brown Bag series in Tobin 521 at noon Wednesday. Everyone is welcome – the abstract is below.

Abstract: In this talk I will describe three experiments demonstrating that rhythmic context influences both listeners’ and readers’ syntactic parsing decisions. In Experiment One, listeners provided written continuations of auditorily-presented ambiguous sentence fragments (e.g., Children know the cruel insult?) which ended with a syntactically ambiguous stress-alternating noun-verb homograph (e.g., insult; INsult = noun, inSULT = verb). The prosody of these fragments was manipulated to bias listeners to perceive the rhythmic pattern of either the noun or the verb. Listeners provided continuations which were consistent with the rhythmic pattern of the fragment. In Experiment Two, readers provided written continuations of similar fragments, though now they were presented visually, and the penultimate word was either one or two syllables (e.g., cruel or heartless), providing an implicit version of the rhythmic manipulation from Experiment One (e.g., The CRUEL inSULT; The HEARTless INsult). Readers demonstrated sensitivity to the rhythmic context, providing more verb-consistent continuations of sentences with a one-syllable penultimate word than those with a disyllabic penultimate word. In Experiment Three, a new set of participants’ eyes were tracked as they read sentences which were like those in Experiment Two, but which were disambiguated as nouns or verbs (e.g., It’s that the cruel/heartless insult (is not going to hurt them / the people who are not threatening). Eye-tracking results indicated that, although readers were garden-pathed by the verb-consistent continuation, reanalysis was easier with the one-syllable adj/noun than the two syllable adj/noun, demonstrating that readers generate implicit rhythmic patterns during silent reading which can serve to influence real-time interpretation of ambiguous sentence material.