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Weekly Digest, 10/7/22

Writer: goldenstateservicesj
goldenstateservicesj
Oct 7, 2022
3 min read

Happy Trojan Family Weekend! And, don’t forget that Fall Break is next week, so SCLing Wrap will also be taking a little autumnal nap. We’ll be back with news the week after!

If you have news to share, please submit your news for future issues of SCling Wrap, cause we need your help keeping up with what’s fresh at USC Linguistics.

Applications open for syntax postdoc and open-rank faculty position in syntax

A reminder that applications are still open for two positions in the department. Please continue to spread the word!

  • Applications for the postdoctoral position in syntax are due Oct. 10, and information can be found here.

  • Applications for the open-rank faculty position in syntax will be review starting Nov. 15, and information about the position and application requirements can be found here.

Look Who’s Talking 🗣

  • Metehan Oguz gave a talk titled “Perspective Shift and Accusative Subject Clauses (ASC) in Turkish: An argument for the proleptic analysis of ASCs” at Workshop on Altaic Formal Linguistics (WAFL) 16, held at the University of Rochester Sept. 30 – Oct. 2.

Mark Your Calendars: Upcoming Colloquia

In person colloquia are finally back! Please mark your calendars for our upcoming October visitors, Naomi Feldman (University of Maryland) and Paul Portner (Georgetown), starting on Monday, October 17 immediately after we return from Fall Break!

Naomi Feldman, University of Maryland

Monday 10/17, 3:30pm

Modeling early phonetic learning from natural speech

Theories of language acquisition have typically been developed using an idealization of the phonetic learning problem.  For example, phonetic category learning models have used input that is much less variable than the speech children hear and have assumed that learners already know which dimensions of the speech signal to pay attention to.  In this talk, I use a series of modeling studies to argue that taking seriously the complexity of children’s speech input has major implications for theories of phonetic learning. We have worked to create models that work on naturalistic speech after finding that phonetic learning models that were developed on simplified data fail when trained on more realistic data.  Our first strategy has been to question theories of what is being learned: perhaps infants are acquiring a language-specific perceptual space during their first year of life, rather than a set of phonetic categories.  Our second strategy has been to question theories of the learning mechanism: perhaps rather than looking for distinct acoustic clusters of sounds corresponding to phones, learners can use statistical information that is more reliable in naturalistic speech.  In each case, we have found that the models that succeed in phonetic learning on naturalistic speech differ in important ways from previous theories.  This work raises new questions about what young infants know about the sounds of their language and underscores the need to take into account the complexity of the data that children hear when building theories of language acquisition. This is joint work with Kasia Hitczenko, Thomas Schatz, Stephanie Antetomaso, Xuan-Nga Cao, Yevgen Matusevych, Kouki Miyazawa, Emmanuel Dupoux, Micha Elsner, Sharon Goldwater, and Reiko Mazuka.

Department Events

  • Monday 10/10, 1pm @ PhonLunch: CV & Website workshop, led by Dani Byrd

  • Tuesday 10/11, 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Haley Hsu on “As a matter of fact: An exploration of objectivity and what can follow ‘the fact that'”

  • Wednesday 10/12, 11:30am @ S-Side Story: Katie Kennedy will lead a discussion on Distributed Morphology

  • Wednesday 10/12, 9am @ Linguistics Teaching Reading Group: course design mini-series part 3: Course learning objectives

  • Monday 10/17, 1pm @ PhonLunch: Elango Kumaran, TBA

  • Tuesday 10/18, 9:30am @ Psycholing Lab: Linh Pham, TBA

 
 
 

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