A bunch of UofC linguists will be presenting at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences in Saarbrücken, Germany (August 6-10):
Fang Liu and Yi Xu (UCL): Question intonation as affected by word stress and focus in English.
James Kirby and Alan Yu: Lexical and phonotactic effects on wordlikeness judgements in Cantonese.
Justin Murphy and Alan Yu: Moraic anchoring of f0 in Washo.
Alan Yu: Tonal phonetic analogy.
An NSF-funded project in the Computer Science department at the University of Chicago is looking for a full-time undergraduate summer intern for the Summer of 2007. The project explores computational approaches to speech recognition and understanding, specifically recognition of tone and intonation. The summer position would continue development of a tool to support computer-assisted learning of tone and intonation. Building on existing software, the plan is to build an interface to provide feedback to language learners by identifying errors in their own speech both visually and auditorily as well as employing synthesis to demonstrate the correct pronunciation. Interested candidate should contact Gina Levow at levow “AT” cs.uchicago.edu for more detail.
The first meeting of the prosody reading group is postponed to Friday, May 25. It will take place at 3:00pm, in G104 (The Harris Room) in the Psychology building (5848 S University Ave.). The first paper to be discussed is by R. Ogden (2006) on “Phonetics and social action in agreements and disagreements” in the Journal of Pragmatics 38, 1752-1775.
Following on several highly informative sessions on using transcription interfaces, the Department of Anthropology is pleased to announce that Todd Schuble, our local expert on spatial analysis software (GIS), will be offering two sessions that will introduce us to the possibilities of linking linguistic and related social data to locationally coded databases. Many databases of demographic and other sociolinguistically relevant information now interface with GIS, providing a great new set of possibilities for sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, dia- and socio-lectology, etc. These two sessions will explore these ways of incorporating spatial analysis into language-focused research.
As before, both sessions will be held in Harper Memorial West Tower, Room 406 (NSIT’s teaching space). They will be held on Thursday, 31 May from 11.30 AM – 1.30 PM and on Friday, 1 June from 1.00 – 3.00 PM. Please make a note of them and plan on attending.
Professor Hildo do Couto (University of Brasilia) will be giving a special lecture on “Stress patterns and syllable structure in Brazilian Portuguese” on Monday, May 21, 3:00 – 5:20 PM, in Cobb 116. Professor do Couto is a Tinker fellow in the Center for Latin American Studies and the Department of Linguistics this spring quarter. He has been teaching a course on the Ecology of the Evolution of Brazilian Portuguese.
The first Prosody Reading Group meeting will take place on Friday, May 18, at 4:00pm in G104 (The Harris Room).
The first reading is the following:
Jerry Sadock will give a colloquium on Thursday, May 17, in Harper 130 at 3:30pm. The title of his talk is “English Tense and the Auxiliary System.”
Later this week, James Kirby and Alan Yu will be presenting “Hidden knowledge of syllable gap wellformedness” at the Workshop on Experimental Approaches to Optimality Theory to be held at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. For more information, go here.