Fresh of the press: Preliminary Mayan results … [Norcliffe & Jaeger]

The orange juice is still warm, the cafe con helado barely melted, the Mexican music that has been playing on repeat for the last couple of hours still swings mind-numbingly in my fried brain (it’s VERY hot and humid here), and here we are: letting you, dear reader [sic], know what the world is waiting for: is there probability-sensitive morphosyntactic production in Yucatec Mayan (similar to English, cf. Frank & Jaeger, 2008-CUNY, 2008-CogSci; Jaeger, 2006-thesis, 207-LSA; Levy & Jaeger, 2007; Wasow et al., in press)? This is a follow-up on a recent post.

Getting started in Mexico: Contacts & Pilots on Mayan

As some of you know, we’ve been planning to study certain aspect of language production in Mayan for some time now. Well, planning has been followed by flying, and now we (Elisabeth Norcliffe, Stanford University, and I) are here and ready to run our first studies!

CogSci08 – here we come

I still don’t know how I managed to not ever have been to CogSci before, but this year it will happen. Thanks to Austin Frank (BCS, UofR), Carlos Gomez Gallo (CS, UofR), and Neal Snider (Ling, Stanford University), a bunch of us will be presenting at CogSci08 in Washington, D.C. in July. I will upload the papers soon.

What’s up?

Phew, time for a short update before I am off again.

• Celeste Kidd just gave her first conference talk at Prosody08 on the pronunciation of function words, investigating the combined effects of availability-based production, redundancy avoidance, collocations, and prosody on the pronunciation of the English indefinite determiner “a”.
• Carlos Gomez Gallo is about to present his work on a multi-modal corpus (video, sound, and plenty of linguistically useful annotation) at LREC08 in Marrakesh, Morocco. This work builds the foundation to Carlos’s CogSci paper (to be presented in July) on planning in language production above the level of the clause [paper].
• Katrina Housel and Ting Qian are about to give there presentation at the University of Rochester Undergraduate Research Workshop. Katrina will talk about her work on the effect of phonological similarity between words in spontaneous sentence production; Ting will talk about his work on Constant Entropy in written Chinese and written English by Chinese speakers.