Calendar of Events
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Approaching linguistic issues with the tools of data science – Christophe Coupé
Approaching linguistic issues with the tools of data science – Christophe Coupé
At the intersection of computational modelling, data analysis and statistics, data science is gradually developing across all scientific domains, and the humanities and social sciences are no exception. Especially in these latter fields, data science rests on an epistemology and a range of techniques which strengths and weaknesses differ from those of longer-established approaches (Kitchin, 2014; Leonelli, 2010). This opens the way to fruitful collaborations between scholars of complementary expertise, and can offer fresh perspectives on old and complex issues. As an illustration of what precedes, linguistics has seen a steady increase in quantitative approaches in recent years, and large datasets […]
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Visual Speech Cues in Language Variation and Change – Jon Havenhill, Georgetown University
Visual Speech Cues in Language Variation and Change – Jon Havenhill, Georgetown University
What are the factors that shape linguistic sound systems? Perceptibility of the acoustic signal has long been argued to play a role in phonological organization. Some theories of historical change (such as Ohala 1993, 2012; Blevins 2004) argue that sound change results from misperception of the acoustic signal, while teleological models of phonology (Lindblom 1990; Hayes et al. 2004) posit that speech is optimized (in part) for auditory perceptibility. Nevertheless, it is well known that speech perception is influenced by a range of non-auditory cues (McGurk & MacDonald 1976; Gick & Derrick 2009; Mayer et al. 2013). Here I discuss the […]
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Understanding the role of phonology in auditory illusions – Karthik Durvasula (Michigan State University)
Understanding the role of phonology in auditory illusions – Karthik Durvasula (Michigan State University)
Native listeners perceive illusory sounds, typically when presented with sound sequences that do not respect the word-internal phonotactic constraints of their language (Dehaene-Lambertz et al. 2000; Dupoux et al. 1999; Kabak and Idsardi, 2007; inter alia). Such perceptual illusions have been claimed to be driven by surface phonotactics and phonetic characteristics of segments (Davidson and Shaw, 2012; Dupoux et al., 2011). In this talk, I will argue that phonological knowledge at large is a crucial modulatory factor in such illusions. Inspired by Bayesian models of speech perception (Feldman and Griffiths, 2007; Sonderegger and Yu, 2010), I suggest that the task of […]
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The role of cross-linguistic data in the science of language – Damián Blasi (University of Zürich)
The role of cross-linguistic data in the science of language – Damián Blasi (University of Zürich)
Data on the languages of the world are complex from a statistical point of view: sparse on many important dimensions, noisy and fostering complex layers of (genealogical, areal and other) dependencies. As a response to this situation, the language sciences have embraced experimental methods, computational modelling as golden standards for evaluating and discovering the processes and factors that shape human languages. This host of methods has provided new insights and opened new research venues, yet I will argue in this presentation that the assumptions behind these approaches are by no means less problematic than the ones underlying the analyses of […]