Past News 2006-2010
The following papers and posters have been accepted for presentation at Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing 2010, at University of York, York, UK:
- Baese-Berk, M. "An examination of the relationship between speech perception and production."
- Goldrick, M., Baker, H. R., Murphy, A., & Baese-Berk, M. "Beyond cascading activation: Lexical-phonetic interactions in speech production."
- Heller, J, Pierrehumbert J., and Rapp D."Predicting words beyond the syntactic horizon: Word recurrence distributions modulate on-line long-distance lexical predictability."
- Paterson, N. & Goldrick, M. "Neighborhood effects in cross-linguistic phonetic processing."
- Yoshida, M., Kazanina, N., Pablos, L., & Sturt, P. "On the Origin of Islands"
- Jennifer Alexander has been offered a posdoc at Simon Frazer University in Burnaby, British Columbia.
Project title: Acoustic Perceptual Properties of Suprasegmental Contrast Systems
Supported by NSF International Research Fellowship Program
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at the 20th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse, at Chicago IL, August 2010:
- Heller, J., Pierrehumbert, J., & Rapp, D. (August 2010). "Word recurrence distributions modulate the on-line predictability of
repeated words in extended texts."
Rachel Baker has accepted the position of Director Applied Linguistics Research and Development at EF Education First.
Tyler Kendall accepted a position as an assistant professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Oregon.
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at the 22nd North American Conference on Chinese Linguistics (NACCL-22), Harvard University, May 2010:
- Honglei Wang, Masaya Yoshida & Janet Pierrehumbert, "Movement within the nominal phrase in Mandarin: reduplicated adjectives"
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at the 46th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago, April 2010:
- Ken Konopka & Janet Pierrehumber, "Vowel dynamics of Mexican Heritage English: Language contact and phonetic change in a Chicago community"
- Mark Ettlinger & Hannah Rohde, "The Pragmatic-Phonetics Interface: Inferences about pronouns influence phonetic category perception"
- Ken Konopka gave an invited talk "Vowels of Mexican Heritage English: Beyond the static", at the TiL (Talks in Linguistics) colloquium at University of Illinois Chicago on February 5th.
- Janet Pierrehumbert will deliver a plenary lecture at the 2011 Linguistic Society of America meeting (6-9 January, 2011, in Pittsburgh)
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at 12th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, University of New Mexico, July 2010:
- Nattalia Paterson & Matt Goldrick "Lexically-conditioned gestural drift in bilingual speech production direction"
Melissa Baese-Berk has been awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grants for the project "Doctoral Dissetation Research: Learning of Novel Phonetic Categories After Training in Perception and Production" (under the direction of Matt Goldrick)
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, March 2010:
- Hannah Rohde & William Horton "Why or what next? Eye movements reveal expectations about discourse direction"
Matt Goldrick has been named an Associate Editor for Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
Alumna Jen Hay (Ph.D 2000), Assoc. Professor of Linguistics at the University of Canterbury, has obtained a $3,250,000 grant to launch the New Zealand Institute of Language Brain and Behaviour, which she will direct. NU Linguistics has an institutional cooperation agreement with NZ ILBB via the Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems. (Press release)
Janet Pierrehumbert has been awarded an Erskine Fellowship to the University of Canterbury in New Zealand for two months this summer.
Janet Pierrehumbert's recent article with Eduardo Altmann and Adilson Motter ("Beyond Word Frequency: Bursts, Lulls, and Scaling in the Temporal Distributions of Words." PLoS ONE, 2009) was featured in Complexity Digest.
Caroline Engstler has been awarded a $2976 Graduate Research grant to fund her dissertation work on "Phonological Attrition after a Study-Abroad Experience" with Matt Goldrick, Ann Bradlow, and Margaret Sinclair.
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the LSA in Baltimore, January 2010:
- Ahern, C. Hayden T. and Ward, G. "An Empirical Investigation of Typicality and Uniqueness Effects on Article Choice"
- Kendall, T and Fridland V. "Mapping production and perception: The influence of regional & individual norms"
- Baker, R. "The perception of English prosodic prominence by non-native speakers"
The following paper has been accepted for presentation at The Psychonomic Society of American in Boston, November 2009.
- Paterson, N.& Goldrick, M. "Does the cognate effect reflect the letter or the spirit of cross-language interaction?"
The following poster has been accepted for presentation at the Acoustical Society of America, San Antonio, Texas. October 2009
- Van Engen, K. "Speech intelligibility in speech noise: a perceptual training study."
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at the
Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology at Indiana University, October 2009
- Baese-Berk, M., Van Engen, K. Walter, M. A. and Bradlow, A. "Perceptual Similarity of Language and Accents"
- Van Engen, K., Brouwer, S., Calandrucci, L., Bradlow, A. "Speech-in-speech Perception: Linguistic Familiarity and Similarity"
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at the American Association for Corpus Linguistics, (AACL), October, 2009
- Vaughn, C., Pierrehumbert, J., & Rohde, H. "Using character n-grams to classify native language in a non-native English corpus of transcribed speech"
Matt Goldrick has been awarded a $429,999 NSF CAREER grant to fund his work on "Integrating Grammatical and Psycholinguistic Approaches to Phonological Processes in Speech Production" from September 2009 through August 2014.
Jiaxi Liu and Page Piccinini have been awarded WCAS conference travel grants for their trips to the meetings of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP) and the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), respectively.
Jiaxi Liu has been awarded a graduate scholarship from the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, providing $50,000 per year for up to six years of graduate education.
Mary Ann Walter will be teaching two courses on experimental phonology and language games in the egg summer school in Poznan, Poland, in August.
Midam Kim has received a $3000 Graduate Research Grant to work on her dissertation project on "Phonetic Accommodation after Perceptual Exposure to Native and Nonnative Speech of English and Korean" with her advisers Ann Bradlow, Sid Horton, and Matt Goldrick.
Matt Goldrick has been awarded tenure and promotion to the rank of Associate Professor.
Soon-to-be doctor Robert Daland has successfully defended his dissertation.
Jordana Heller has been awarded a Cognitive Science Advanced Fellowship for 2009-10 for her project entitled "Timing of Discourse-Thematic and Non-Thematic Words in Speech and Reading," co-advised by Janet Pierrehumbert and David Rapp (Learning Sciences/Psychology).
At the Chicago Area Undergraduate Research Symposium (CAURS) in Chicago, April 2009:
- Liu, J., "Comparing the perception of musical and linguistic discourse structure."
- Piccinini, P., "Semantic Contextual Cues and Listener Adaptation to Foreign-Accented English" and won the best poster award.
Greetings to our incoming class of graduate students: Lauren Ackerman (Boston University), Ann Burchfield (Simons Rock), Karen Chu (MIT), Michael Frazier (U. Virginia), and Jenna Luque (Northwestern).
Olivia Cooper (BA 2009) has accepted an offer from the Industrial and Organizational Psychology Program at the University of Oklahoma to enter their Ph.D. program in Fall, 2009.
Alex Djalali (BA 2008, currently ILLC, University of Amsterdam) will be presenting his work on "Probabilistic inferences in dynamic semantics" (jointly with Stefan Kaufmann) at the Tenth Symposium on Logic and Language LoLa10) in Balatonszemes, Hungary, in August 2009.
Amanda Murphy has been awarded a $3,000 University Research Grants Committee (URGC) summer research grant to work on her project on "Speech production and aphasia: Exploring the effects of deficits to lexical access on phonological encoding" with Matt Goldrick.
Stefan Kaufmann has been awarded a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for the 2009-10 academic year to work on the project "Speaking of Possibility and Time."
Stefan Kaufmann has accepted an invitation to spend the 2009-10 academic year as a fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg at Georg-August-Universität Götingen, Germany.
Stefan Kaufmann has received a $5,000 grant from the Hewlett Foundation to purchase a server and backup service for data storage and analysis to be used in computational linguistics courses.
Mary Ann Walter has accepted a job as Assistant Professor at the Middle East Technical University, in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus.
Robert Daland has accepted a tenure-track position in Phonology at UCLA.
Jiaxi Liu has been awarded a DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst) scholarship to study German in Germany in Summer, 2009.
Gregory Ward was elected a Fellow of the Lingusitic Society of America.
Ann Bradlow was elected a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America.
Ken Konopka recently gave an invited talk at Norteastern Illinois University on "Mexican Heritage English: Language Variation in Chicago."
Two of our graduate students were awarded Graduate Research Grants this year: Jennifer Alexander for her project "Acoustic Properties of Suprasegmental Contrast Systems," and Nattalia Paterson for work on "The Role of Word-Specific Factors in Producing Second Language Accents."
Chun-Liang Chan has received an Honorable Mention for the WCAS Meteor Staff Award.
Northwestern Linguistics will co-host Speech Prosody 2010 in Chicago in partnership with faculty at the Beckman Institute (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) and the Toyota Technological Institute (Chicago). Speech Prosody is a special interest group of ISCA, the International Speech Commmunication Association. The successful bid was spearheaded by Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, of the Beckman Institute.
Soon-to-be Doctor Lewis Gebhardt has successfully defended his dissertation.
Jiaxi Liu has won a $1,000 URGC grant to support her work on her honors project "Comparing the perception of musical and linguistic discourse structure" with Ric Ashley, Brady Clark and Stefan Kaufmann.
Presentations at this year's In Search Of Meaning (ISOM), the Midwest Semantics/Pragmatics workshop, held at The Ohio State University on October 18, 2009:
Rachel Baker, Ryan Doran, Meredith larson, Yaron McNabb, and Gregory Ward: Distinguishing between the SAID and the IMPLICATED: An Empirical Investigation
The following papers have been accepted for presentation at the Annual Meeting of the LSA in San Francisco, January 2009:
- Robert Daland: Diphone-based word segmentation in Russian and English
- Midam Kim: Discourse Markers in Conversations between Native and Nonnative Speakers
- Hannah Rohde and Andrew Kehler: QUD-Driven Expectations in Discourse Interpretation
- Hannah Rohde and Andrew Kehler: Grammatical and Coherence-Driven Biases in Pronoun Interpretation
- Meredith Larson: Long-term effects of embedding on structural priming
- Eyal Sagi, Brady Clark, and Stefan Kaufmann: Tracing semantic change with Latent Semantic Analysis
- Celina Troutman and Brady Clark: Person, Pragmatics, and Principle B.
- Xiaoju Zheng and Janet Pierrehumbert: The effects of metrical prominence and position on duration perception
McWOP 16 (the Sixteenth Annual Mid-Continental Workshop on Phonology) October 29-31, 2010.
Northwestern University Language Evolution Workship
September 10, 2010.
Speech and Prosody
May 11-14, 2010.
Illinois Speech Day
May 10, 2010.
May 11, 2011.
NSF Workshop on Animacy and Information Status Annotation, held at the Orrington Hotel, Evanston, Il.
September 25-28, 2008.
Third International Workshop on Language Production
August 13-15, 2006