3rd October 2024 04:30 PM

Linguistics Colloquium Speaker: Dr. Molly Babel to lecture on "What's in a voice? Language-specific and language-general phonetics"

The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Molly Babel, Professor of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia and director of the University's Speech in Context Lab.

Dr. Babel will give a talk  titled:  What's in a voice?  Language-specific and language-general phonetics

A light reception with the speaker to follow.

Abstract:

Voices are rich with biological, social, and linguistic signatures all baked into the same signal. Bilingual voices are particularly interesting because when speaking one language or the other, a talker changes the linguistic and, often, social packaging, but an individual’s vocal tract anatomy remains constant.

In this talk, I share our work on the acoustic structures across languages in Cantonese-English bilingual voices, which demonstrates that Cantonese-English bilingual voices are highly similar across languages (Johnson & Babel, 2023).

This would suggest that it would be easy to track a bilingual’s identity across languages, which we know empirically not to be the case.  Armed, however, with the knowledge that there is substantial information shared across a bilingual’s languages, we test listeners from four language backgrounds, to assess whether group-level differences in voice learning are due (i)  to varying abilities to access the relative acoustic-phonetic features that distinguish a voice, (ii) to learn at a given rate, or (iii) to generalize learning of talker-voice associations to novel same-language and different-language utterances.

Differences in performance across listener groups show evidence in support of the language familiarity effect and of the role of two mechanisms for voice learning: the extraction and association of talker-specific, language-general information that can be more robustly generalized across languages, and talker-specific, language-specific information that may be more readily accessible and learnable, but due to its language-specific nature, is less able to be extended to another language.

Bio:

Dr. Babel is  interested in speech perception and production, and there is a strong theme of cross-linguistic and cross-dialectal inquiry in her work.

More specifically, her research program focuses on the role of experience and exposure to phonetic and phonological knowledge, how social knowledge may be manifested phonetically, and the mental representation of phonetic and phonological knowledge.

A significant portion of her work explores how interacting language systems influence one another on a phonetic level. She has investigated this within bilingual speakers (English and Northern Paiute), across dialects (Australian and New Zealand Englishes), and within dialects (American English).

She has also have a strong interest in language documentation and description; with colleagues at University of California, Berkeley, she conducted fieldwork on Northern Paiute (Numic; Uto-Aztecan).

3rd October 2024 06:00 PM

ASL Performance Series presents Jeremy Lee Stone in "ASL is ART"

The Department of Linguistics and ASL Program proudly presents Jeremy Lee Stone, from ASL NYC. 

Jeremy will perform "ASL is ART", where he will explore the history and evolution of ASL poetry, highlighting key figures like Clayton Valli. He will perform his ABC story “The Matrix” and the ASL poem “Glitch,” showcasing storytelling techniques such as Visual Vernacular. Audience members will engage in interactive exercises, including an Alphabet story and a slow-motion group activity. Jeremy will also encourage incorporating ASL into personal expressions and interests.

The session concludes with a Q&A.

ASL/English interpretation will be provided.

Bio:

Jeremy Lee Stone, a native of Harlem, New York, was born Deaf, and from that silence, he has amplified a powerful message. Fluent in American Sign Language, he is on a mission to showcase ASL as the language of the future, proving that the future is here and now. Recognizing the need for broader understanding and acceptance, Jeremy founded ASL NYC, a groundbreaking ASL class.

Venturing into the entertainment industry, he has become a sought-after ASL Consultant. Through his work, he aims to redefine perceptions of deafness and seamlessly integrate it into mainstream consciousness. Beyond his professional endeavors, Jeremy finds joy in crafting stories through the fluid motions of his hands, bringing his visions to life in a captivating tapestry of expression.

4th October 2024 11:15 AM

C.Psyd - Beyond Projecting: Nouns’ and Modifiers’ Influence on Protorole Properties

This week in C.Psyd, Zander and Lucas will present some of their ongoing work.

Their presentation is titled: Projecting: Nouns’ and Modifiers’ Influence on Protorole Properties


Abstract:

 It has long been thought that verbs are the primary focus of events due to linguistic theories which hypothesize that thematic roles are projected from the verb onto its arguments.

For example, Dowty (1991) claimed that verbs entail a set of characteristics onto their arguments, which can be categorized as either proto-agent (eg. awareness, instigation, sentience) or proto-patient (eg. change of state, change of location, manipulated). However, Husband (2023) argues for thematic separation, in which arguments may be given thematic roles, or alternatively Dowty’s protoroles, prior to reading the verb.

In this project, we investigate the role of nouns and adjectives in assigning and modifying role features previously theorized to be assigned only by verbal predicates. We probe computational models trained to predict proto-role properties to show that LLMs largely attend to the arguments themselves, especially for subjects.

Subsequently we used WordNet to identify the features of nouns that are semantically meaningful for assigning proto-role properties. As well as looking at nouns we also looked into adjectives as a means of assigning roles to the arguments of a sentence through experimental methods of annotation and judgment collection.

These preliminary results indicate that roles are not solely given out by the verb but rather by some combination of the contentful words in a sentence.

4th October 2024 12:20 PM

Informal Talk by Molly Babel: The own-voice benefit in word recognition

Dr. Molly Babel will give an informal talk titled:  The own-voice benefit in word recognition

Abstract:

There is a well-documented familiarity benefit in spoken word recognition and sentence processing. Simply, listeners show improved performance when presented with familiar languages, accents, and individuals. How does an individual’s own voice factor into the familiarity boost?

In this talk, I present the evidence for an own-voice benefit in word recognition in a population of early bilinguals, extending recent work demonstrating an own-voice benefit for late L2 learners (Eger & Reinisch, 2019).

The results suggest that the phonetic distributions that undergird phonological contrasts are heavily shaped by one’s own phonetic realization. I’ll discuss the implications of this for our understanding of phonetic knowledge