BLING

Mitcho Erlewine, one of our graduating seniors, has been awarded a Fulbright fellowship to teach English in Taiwan. Congratulations!

The talks that Jason Stanley was scheduled to give next week — a linguistics colloquium on Thursday and a semantics/philosophy workshop talk on Friday — have been postponed until fall quarter, as Jason will not be able to make it to Chicago next week.

The workshop on semantics and philosophy of language is pleased to announce a talk this Friday, May 25, by Chris Barker from NYU. The talk will take place 11-1 in Classics 47. The title of his talk is “The case against E-type donkey pronouns”. Some background reading can be downloaded from the workshop website:

http://semantics.uchicago.edu/workshops/spl/barker.html

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.