Language Science Lunch Talks
Although we will continue to offer a Zoom option for LSLT for now, we strongly encourage you to attend in person! The talk is only part of the point of LSLT: it's a good opportunity to meet and chat with students and faculty in other departments. This week we're reinstating the classic LSLT sandwich line (with a few improvements to keep things more sanitary).
Zoom link: https://go.umd.edu/lslt-zoom
Do we speak better than we understand?
Prediction during language processing: Beyond activation
Abstract: Prediction during language processing has been extensively studied over the past decades, however, the specific mechanisms involved are under ongoing debate. In this talk I will focus on a suggested distinction between two qualitatively distinct prediction processes, pre-activation and pre-updating, presenting experiments aimed to examine key aspects of these processes.
How a dialect-shifting curriculum shapes K-1 teachers’ attitudes toward language variation: A mixed-methods study
Identifying a code-switch: exploring methods for studying the use of prosodic and phonetic cues
Island effects and their absence with multiple questions in Bulgarian
Abstract: Grammars exhibit island effects. That is to say, the linguistic knowledge a speaker has prevents them from forming questions in certain environments. For example, the string "Who did you meet the professor that taught?" cannot be used to ask who is the person such that you met the professor who taught that person. In this talk, I report experimental evidence concerning the possible obviation of island effects in Bulgarian with multiple questions.
Bilingual Code-switching: Exploring Variation in Comprehension Costs
Abstract: Bilinguals experience costs during comprehension when there is a switch between languages—taking longer to process a “code-switch” than single-language input. However, the magnitude of these comprehension costs varies. In this talk, I present data from a study that attempts to explain variation in code-switch comprehension costs.
Charlotte will be presenting remotely, but we will have an in-person audience at the Language Science Center in addition to Zoom.
Listener knowledge about sociolinguistic variation
Modeling children's acquisition of speech acts and clause types
This project investigates how children come to associate clause types with their canonical function, and in particular, interrogatives to questions. We examined speech acts and clause types in speech to children. I will first report some of the results from our corpus study, and then discuss our plans to model the learning process computationally, and how we are going to use Robustly-optimized BERT approach (RoBERTa) to assist the annotation process.
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