Chicagoans at Penn Linguistics Colloquium

Autumn quarter’s sociophonetics seminar has proven fruitful—the experiment designed by the class has been accepted to the Penn Linguistics Colloquium (PLC 34)!  The eight co-authors include Alan Yu, Carissa Abrego-Collier, Rebekah Baglini, Tommy Grano, Martina Martinovic, Charles Otte III (NELC/Ling), Julia Thomas, and Jasmin Urban.

The paper, entitled “Mediating factors in phonetic imitation: Perceived sexual orientation,” will be presented Saturday, March 20.

Continuing Chicago’s efforts to invade Penn, Chris Kennedy also happens to be the invited plenary speaker at PLC this year. The title of his talk is “The Composition of Incremental Change” (abstract here).

Super conference acceptances

Fourth-year Nassira Nicola recently learned some exciting news: the acceptance of her submission to the Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research (TISLR 10) in October at Purdue University.  She’ll be presenting her paper, “Re-Analyzing Plural Classifier Predicates in American Sign Language.” Congrats, Nassira!

Third-year grad Ryan Bochnak also has a poster acceptance to a big conference, this year’s Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 20) in Vancouver, April 29-May 1. His poster is on “Quantity and gradability across categories.” Just a few days later, he’ll give a talk on “Exceed comparatives in Luganda” at the 41st Annual Conference on African Linguistics in Toronto, May 6-8.

[Update] And this just in:

Max Bane (Linguistics) and Morgan Sonderegger (Computer Science), along with Peter Graff (MIT, Linguistics) have been accepted to present a poster titled “Longitudinal phonetic variation in a closed system” at the 12th Conference on Laboratory Phonology (LabPhon 12), July 8-10 at the University of New Mexico.

Looking forward to hearing about these appearances!

Reminder about colloquium

Due to job talks this month, the 2009-2010 colloquium series has had a delayed winter-quarter start. For all those waiting in eager anticipation, colloquia will finally resume next week, Thursday, February 25, with a talk by UChicago’s Katherine Kinzler (Psychology). More on her lab’s research can be found here. As usual, we’ll begin at 3:30 in Cobb 201, followed by tea at 5:00 in the department lounge. See you there!

Some recent Canada conferences

Alan Yu gave two invited lectures in Canada this past couple weeks. The first lecture, “Washo Word Prosody”, was presented at the Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas (WSCLA 15) at the University of Ottawa in Ontario. He then presented “When does perceptual compensation fail? The implications of analyzing channel bias rationally” at the Workshop on Computational Modelling of Sound Pattern Acquisition at the University of Alberta – Edmonton.

Meanwhile, third-year grad Alice Lemieux also presented at University of Ottawa for WSCLA 15 a couple weeks ago. Her presentation was titled “Small but significant – body part incorporation in Washo,” and the abstract can be found here.