Professionalization Workshop
SyntaxFest
NASSLLI 2010
Colloquia and Talks
Spring Semester Discussion Groups
Conferences and Calls for Papers

This semester the Department will be holding several professionalization workshops on particular important topics regarding the profession that are aimed toward graduate students. The first of these workshops will be held Friday Feb. 5th from 4-5pm in Sycamore Hall 105 and will be on the topic of conferences. This includes when you should consider presenting your work at a conference, which of the many conferences you should present at, writing abstracts, planning and funding, presenting, networking, and publications. Everyone is welcomed to attend.

This June, the Department of Linguistics will host SyntaxFest 2010 - a series of workshops by leading researchers in the field of Syntax on topics related to theoretical description in the Minimalist Program. A schedule of lecture times and topics is posted below. Information about registration and housing is available on the website.

Time	Speaker	Topic
9:30 - 10:45	Norbert Hornstein	Outlines of a Minimalist Syntax
11:00 - 12:15	Howard Lasnik	EPP, repair by elipsis, and the organization of the grammar
Lunch
1:45 - 3:00	Željko Bošković	Issues in locality, agreement and the structure of NP
3:15 - 4:30	Norvin Richards	Prosody and syntax
4:45 - 6:00	Jason Merchant	Linguistic interfaces and the architecture of the grammar

North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information

After previous editions at Stanford University, Indiana University, and UCLA, NASSLLI will return to Bloomington, Indiana, June 20–26, 2010. The summer school, loosely modeled on the long-running ESSLLI series in Europe, will consist of a number of courses and workshops, selected on the basis of the proposals. Courses and workshops meet for 90 or 120 minutes on each of five days, June 21–25, and there will be tutorials on June 20 and a day-long workshop on June 26. The instructors are prominent researchers who volunteer their time and energy to present basic work in their disciplines. Many are coming from Europe just to teach at NASSLLI.

People interested in volunteering to help with the workshop should contact Markus Dickinson. Other information about the Workshop can be found on the NASSLLI 2010 Website.

(Slavic Linguistics) Incomplete Acquisition: Second Language vs Heritage Language Contexts

Outcomes of second/foreign language (L2) acquisition after puberty and heritage language (HL) acquisition before puberty have often been characterized as systematic, yet incomplete/ interrupted, influenced by transfer from the stronger language and potentially fundamentally different from monolingual first language (L1) acquisition in childhood. This study compares proficiency-matched college level foreign language learners and heritage language learners of Russian in their ability to interpret Russian aspectual contrasts. Do HL learners have any advantage over L2 learners at the same overall proficiency level in interpretation and processing tasks? Preliminary results suggest that L2 and HL participants do not always converge, and that overall high proficiency may not be a guarantee of a fully acquired category. The tasks are designed to tease apart whether in the notoriously challenging Russian Verbal Aspect it is the lexical/semantic component (expressed via prefixation) or the grammatical component (expressed via suffixation) that presents a greater difficulty to both groups of learners and to a control group of monolinguals.

(Speech Research Laboratory) Executive Functioning in Preschool and School-Age Children: The Feasibility of Assessing Working Memory Capacity with Buschke's Missing Scan Task

The purpose of this study was to develop a new method to assess working memory capacity in young children 3-5.11 years in age. Thirty-three children (F=16) between 3- 5.11 years in age (M=4.26) were recruited to assess the feasibility of using a modified version of Buschke's missing scan task with young children. In addition to the missing scan task, data were obtained from the PPVT, NEPSY-II subtests, and the BRIEF-P, over a total of four sessions. All three age groups had an average score within normal limits on the PPVT and NEPSY subtests. Correlational analyses on the largest set size variable of the missing scan task revealed significant associations with several NEPSY-II subtests and the PPVT measures. The results provide support for the feasibility of using the modified missing scan task to obtain object behaviorally-based measures of working memory capacity in young, typically-developing children as well as children with developmental disorders of disturbances in working memory.

(Second Language Studies Colloquium) Mimicry of L2 consonants and tones in relation to perception and production

This study compares the mimicry of L2 consonants and tones to explore two research questions: 1) Is mimicry more closely related to perception, production, or the combination of both? 2) Does mimicry of consonants differ from that of tones in terms of processing mechanisms involved? Two groups of L2 learners participated in three tasks: Identification, Reading, and Mimicry. One group is 20 Korean EFL learners, the target of investigation being English obstruents. The other group is 20 CFL learners whose native language is either English or Cantonese, the target being Mandarin tones. We computed the accuracy rates and error patterns for each target sound in every task and correlated rates across the tasks to test three models: Perception model (Identification vs. Mimicry): Mimicry errors are due to perceptual deficits, Production model (Reading vs. Mimicry): Mimicry errors are due to lack of motor skills, and a Cascade model (combination of Identification and Reading vs. Mimicry); Mimicry patterns are the results of perceptual deficits feeding into non-native motor skills. The results of the consonant experiment show that both the Production and the Cascade models yield strong correlations with the Mimicry performance. Yet the Cascade model is most successful with error rate correlations, suggesting that the performance in Mimicry can be better predicted by cascading Identification and Reading than by either of them alone. As for the second experiment assessing L2 acquisition of tones, none of the three models correlate significantly with Mimicry in accounting for the accuracy rates. Regarding the error patterns, the three models yield much lower r2 values than those in the consonant experiment and there is no significant difference between the three models. The lack of strong correlation is because the subjects performed much better in the Mimicry task than in the other two tasks, which is not the case for the consonant experiment. This suggests that the mimicry of tones may bypass linguistic categorization, explaining why some errors appear in both Identification and Reading tasks but not in the Mimicry task. On the other hand, the mimicry of consonants seems to require higher-level categorization. Thus we can successfully account for L2 learners' performance in the Mimicry task by cascading their performance in the Identification and Reading tasks.

(Speech and Hearing Sciences) The Use of Graphic Symbols in AAC: What do we know?

As augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) intervention becomes of age, it is important to investigate strategies that can enhance the access of children to messages in the most effective and economic way. Basic to the issue of providing access to pictographic symbols is the way in which children relate to the symbols. The first exposure to symbols as well as the time invested in learning a symbol set or system can significantly influence the sustainability of the AAC intervention process. Not only do these issues impact the attitude of people toward the use of AAC, they also impose a cognitive load on the potential AAC user that can affect outcomes.

This presentation will review basic information on graphic symbols and then present four recently completed studies (Basson and Alant, 2005; Bornman, Alant and Du Preez, (submitted); Haupt and Alant, 2002; Visser, Alant and Harty, 2008) which explore specific issues in symbol learning and use. Study designs typically are descriptive and comparative in nature to highlight similarities and differences in participants' performances. Finally, I will briefly comment on the ongoing studies in these areas and address the implications of the findings for future research. Directions for further study will focus on 1) the application of findings to different disability population groups, for example, intellectual disabilities and autism and 2) research questions which need further exploration with typically developing children.

Syntax Reading Group

Syntax Reading Group this semester will concentrate on background reading in preparation for SyntaxFest, to be held in June.

NEXT MEETING: Josh Herring will lead discussion of Chomsky's "On Phases." If you would like to participate in the discussion, please contact Steve Franks to get a copy of the reading.

Computational Linguistics Lunch

Computational Linguistics Lunch is an informal discussion group in which students and faculty present projects they are working on in the area of Computational and Computer-aided Linguistics. It is a good opportunity to stay on top of research being done at IU in the Computational subfields of Linguistics. Meetings this semester will be Tuesdays at 11am in Memorial Hall 401.

NEXT MEETING: Markus Dickinson and Marwa Ragheb will speak on Dependency Annotation for Learner Language.

Midwest Undergraduate Cognitive Science Conference

The Indiana University Student Organization for Cognitive Science and the Indiana University Cognitive Science Program are pleased to announce the Midwest Undergraduate Cognitive Science Conference on the weekend of April 11-12, 2009 in Bloomington, Indiana. This conference is organized to provide the next generation ofcognitive scientists an opportunity to present their research to their peers from across the Midwest.

Potential speakers should send a 250-500 word abstract to cogsconf@indiana.edu by March 1, 2010. Applicants should indicate whether they wish to present a talk, poster or either. Talks will be up to 15-minutes in length, followed by a short question and answer session. Posters will be showcased during an one-hour session and presenters must be present to answer questions.

For more information, please visit the conference website.

Conferences Supplement

Information about a wide range of conferences can be found in the Linguistics Calendar Conferences Supplement, which is currently being updated. Please check this link early next week for a list of opportunities for conference attendance and paper submission in areas of interest to IU Linguists.