Visiting the Yucatan: more studies on Yucatec Mayan and Mexican Spanish

Heya. There are no results yet, but Katrina Housel, Carlos Gomez Gallo, and I just came back from the Valladolid, Mexico where we piloted and ran 3 studies on Yucatec and 4 studies on Mexican Spanish.

Follow-up experiments on sentence production in Yucatec

Elisabeth Norcliffe, Katrina Housel, Juergen Bohnemeyer and I have been working on the next step in our investigations of Yucatec sentence production (see previous post). Some people have asked for more detail on the design and material and we definitely appreciate the feedback.

We started designing a series of experiments on Yucatec word order and voice choices, focusing on accessibility effects (such as the relative animacy of the agent and patient in a transitive event) trying to find evidence that distinguishes between alignment and availability accounts of accessibility effects (or provides evidence that both mechanisms are found). Due its typological features, in particular the available word orders and the way voice is marked (morphologically, without necessarily requiring word order changes), Yucatec seems perfect to test whether more accessible referents are order first (availability), aligned with the subject function (alignment, as expressed in Bock, 1986), or whether structural choices (such as a passive over an active) indicated marked or unmarked alignment between grammatical or semantic function with the relative salience of the involved referents.

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!