Ohio

Judith Degen, Masha Fedzechkina and I just came back from Ohio State’s linguistics departments, where we had a great time presenting and discussing our work. Masha gave her first talk ever, presenting her work within the artificial language learning paradigm on functional biases on acquisition (an extension of her LSA poster, soon to be posted here). Judith gave a wonderful guest lecture for Shari Speer’s introduction to psycholinguistics. She talked about scalar implicature and her work with Mike Tanenhaus on this topic. Since even I got it (and I am well-known to be pragmatically challenged), I can highly recommend her slides on scalar implicature processing (beware it’s a monster file – click and go grab a coffee).

Thanks to everyone there for great and insightful conversations and for organizing this. I was particularly excited to hear about potential applications of Uniform Information Density to natural language generation (please keep me posted!). Oh, and extra big thanks to Judith Tonhauser and her fat white cat.

HLP Lab at the LSA and congratulations to Judith Degen and Masha Fedzechkina

Congratulations to Judith Degen and Masha Fedzechkina for having their two abstracts be among only twelve selected to be “media-worthy” by LSA reviewers:

• Degen, J. and Jaeger, T. F. 2011.  Speakers sacrifice some (of the) precision in conveyed meaning to accommodate robust communication. Talk to be presented at the 2011 Meeting of the LSA.
  • Session: Pragmatics II  31
  • Room: Le Batea
  • Time: Friday 2pm

The process of encoding an intended meaning into a linguistic utterance is well-known to be affected by production pressures. We present corpus data suggesting that the choice between even two seemingly non-meaning-equivalent forms as in (1a) and (1b) can be affected by speakers’ preference to distribute information uniformly across the linguistic signal (Uniform Information Density (UID), Jaeger 2006). This suggests that even when two forms do not encode the same (but a similar enough) message, speakers may sacrifice precision in meaning for increased processing efficiency.

(1a) Alex ate some chard.
(1b) Alex ate some of the chard

• Fedzechkina, M., Jaeger. T. F. , and Newport, E. 2011. Word order and case marking in language acquisition and processing. Poster to be presented at the 2011 Meeting of the LSA.
  • Session: Language Acquisition/Psycholinguistics/Syntax
  • Room: Grand Ballroom Foyer
  • Time: 9:00 – 10:30 AM.

To understand a sentence, comprehenders must identify its actor and patient. In principle, these relationships can be signaled using a single cue, but most languages employ several redundant cues, including word order and case marking. In artificial language learning experiments we investigate word order and case as cues in processing and learning. In languages without case marking, learners regularize word order; but when case marking is present, it is favored and limits word order regularization. Case-marking comes with a disadvantage: it is more complex to acquire. But the present results suggest that this may be outweighed by clarity for processing.

LSA09-125: Psycholinguistics and Syntactic Corpora

The LSA Summer Institute is almost over and it has been a lot of fun so far. I didn’t get to see nearly as many talks and classes as I had hoped to, but instead there were tons of interesting conversations, new ideas, and just nice moments hanging out in the sun.

Brief update: It couldn’t have been different — I missed my flight. That happens every time I try to leave the Bay area. I am so used to it, I am not even trying to be on time anymore . Ah well, it gives me a chance to enjoy a cappuccino in my favorite SF Cafe (Ritual Roasters) and even to attend Dan’s party (yippie!). Oh, and to upload some random pictures from the class room. Yeah, pretty dark I know. If you have better pictures — can you send them to me and I upload them? Also, here are some pics from our office hours at Caffee Strada (thanks to Judith and Alex for a great job!):

Random class room shot (2)

Random class room shot

Late night “office hours” at Jupiter’s

Michi smiling with TGrep2 at his command (almost!)

Judith and Alex working hard to spread the word of Switchboard

Judith (at hour 2 of 6)

hmm, probably at Jupiter’s again

LSA125-ers — thanks for an enjoyable class, for all the questions, and I hope you keep enjoying your projects (or, if nothing else, now know for certain that you really really never want to work with corpora . Send us an update about your papers as they progress.

To everyone else out there: If you’re interested in the use of syntactic corpora to investigate language production, you may find our LSA125 class webpage useful (see especially the links and information on the corpus pages, but also the slides). If you use material from this page, please let us know. Thanks to Judith, we now have a nicely documented version of the TGrep2 Database Tools, which we have dubbed TDTlite. Alex and Judith have also prepared example projects. TDTlite allows you to combine the output of TGrep2 searchers on syntactic corpora into a nice tab-delimited database that can be importated into R, Excel, or the stats program of your choice. While it doesn’t give you the full flexibility of scripting things yourself, it makes it considerably easier to start your own corpus-based project. We’re in the progress of polishing things up for distribution (thanks to all the brave members of our class who helped us to understand which parts still need further improvement!). So, if something like that might be of interest to you, let us know whether you would like further information. We hope to have a beta release by the end of August.