Natural language research announcements

[Margaret Fleck <mfleck AT cs.uiuc.edu>]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Linguistics Club Lecture - Louis Goldstein
Date: Wed, 5 Oct 2011 11:16:14 -0500
From: Maureen Gillespie 
<gillespie.maureen AT gmail.com>

FYI:


Hello everyone,

This Monday we have an invited speaker for the Linguistics Club Lecture
series. Louis Goldstein from the University of Southern California will be
presenting. Professor Goldstein is well known for his work on the theory of
Articulatory Phonology. Please see the abstract below.

The lecture will be held at 319 Gregory Hall from 4-5pm on Monday, October
10th.
(Note that this is not one of our weekly Thursday seminars.)

The event is sponsored by the Department of Linguistics and co-sponsored by
the Cognitive Science / Artificial Intelligence series; The Department of
Speech and Hearing Science; The Speech Production Workshop; and the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.




"Nonlinear Coordination Dynamics in Phonological Grammar and Sound Change"

Recent work [3] has modeled temporal planning for speech production using
ensembles of nonlinear oscillators (or clocks) that are coupled to one
another in a phonologically specific fashion represented in a coupling
graph. The topology of such graphs leverages the the fact that coupled
oscillators exhibit discrete, stable modes, and the graphs can be therefore
used to represent distinct syllable structures in grammar. In addition,
however, networks of oscillators exhibit spontaneous, qualitative
transitions from more complex to simpler modes of frequency- and
phase-locking as a function of continuous variation in a control parameter
(e.g., speaking rate). Therefore, the grammatically-regulated coordination
pattern can be de-stabilized in such circumstances, and a contextually more
stable one can emerge instead. Evidence of such qualitative transitions were
found [1] in the gestural intrusion errors observed when talkers repeat
utterances such as cop top. In this talk, I introduce this framework, and
also use it to account for certain types of sound change. In these examples,
transition to the simplest mode of phase-locking (in-phase) will be shown to
be the possible source of a change in which two gestures that are planned as
sequential before the change become synchronous after the change. Such sound
changes include pre-aspirated to post-aspirated stops in Western Andalusian
Spanish [4], and the Tone 3 sandhi rule in Mandarin [2].

[1] Goldstein, L, Pouplier, M., Chen, L., Saltzman, E., and Byrd, D. (2007).
Dynamic action units slip in speech production errors. Cognition, 103,
386-412.
[2] Hsieh, Fang-Ying (2010). Gesture Reorganization in Mandarin Tone 3
Sandhi. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 128:2458 (abstract).
[3] Nam, H., Goldstein, L., & Saltzman, E. (2010). Self-organization of
syllable structure: a coupled oscillator model. In F. Pellegrino, E.
Marisco, & I. Chitoran, (Eds). Approaches to phonological complexity.
Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 299-328.
[4] Parrell, B. (accepted). The role of gestural phasing in Western
Andalusian Spanish aspiration. Journal of Phonetics.




Thank you and see you on Monday,
Daniel Ross


------
Maureen Gillespie, PhD

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Department of Psychology
Postdoctoral Researcher
NIH-Funded Language Processing Training Grant

http://sites.google.com/site/gillespiemaureen/