On Monday 11/21, John Alderete (Simon Fraser U) will give a talk entitled “Language generality in phonological encoding: Moving beyond Indo-European languages” at 1:15pm in ILC N400 (& Zoom: see below). The title and abstract of his talk can be found below. Everyone is welcome!

Dr. Alderete’s research gives close formal analyses of phonological and morphological systems, and asks how these systems are learned and represented in larger theories of cognitive science. His dissertation and related work addressed theoretical questions concerning how phonological structures, and the morphological influences on these structures, can be formalized in constraint-based theories of grammar. His later work extended these questions using fieldwork, computational, and experimental methods to probe the learnability and viability of these structures, as well as how they are encoded and accessed in online production processes. His current focus, actively pursued with his students in the Language Production Lab, investigates how language particular phonological structures shape speech production processes.

Title: Language generality in phonological encoding: Moving beyond Indo-European languages

Abstract: Theories of phonological encoding are centred on the selection and activation of phonological segments, and how these segments are organised in word and syllable structures in online processes of speech planning. The focus on segments, however, is due to an over-weighting of evidence from Indo-European languages, because languages outside this family exhibit strikingly different behaviour. We examine speech error, priming, and form encoding studies in Mandarin, Cantonese, and Japanese, and argue that these languages deepen our understanding of phonological encoding. These languages demonstrate the need for language particular differences in the first selectable (proximate) units of phonological encoding and the phonological units processed as word beginnings. Building on these results, an analysis of tone slips in Cantonese suggests that tone is processed concurrently with segments and sequentially assigned after segments to fully encoded syllables.

Zoom: https://umass-amherst.zoom.us/j/93267322657?pwd=UHdaUWNZTGFOeDZZYktlSTlMWGpMZz09

Meeting ID: 932 6732 2657; Passcode: 463946).