Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Club Activities Update (9/26)

We have had a lovely year so far and only expect things to get better this year in Linguistics Club! Welcome again to all our new and returning members! In case you missed it, here are some of the meetings we've had already:
-Our Mass Meeting, in which we introduced ourselves and the club, and played a rousing game of MooT! Both teams (the Afro-Asiatic team and the Dravidian team) tied. There was also free pizza and cookies, courtesy of the department and Sarah Harper, respectively.

-Our second meeting, where we watched Project Nim and had free popcorn. We also had coloring books with famous linguists. You can download the coloring book here.

-For our third meeting, we repeated an old classic, "Language and Humor Night." We watched comedians talk about language. Links will be posted later for you to see them again and show them to your friends! There was also free cake, courtesy of Cassie Kelly. (Noticing a theme?)

Keep an eye on this blog for all upcoming events! We have a "big" event (normally a guest lecture or a movie) with free pizza on the first of every month. Upcoming events include: a movie this Monday (TBA), an exec board presentation on Artificial Languages, a TV Dialects night, a collaboration with the Society of Physics Students on the Physics of Speech and Sound, and a guest appearance from Sam Epstein, plus possibly a "field trip" to the LSA Meeting in January. Stay tuned!

Michigan Linguistics Over the Summer

Welcome back, everyone! The Linguistics Club has gotten off to a great start this year with a handsome bunch of fresh faces and a great line-up of fun events. I will post more about those later ("I" being your friendly neighborhood Linguistics Club president, Amy Hemmeter), but now I want to share the stories of some of our Linguistics concentrators and their exciting summers:
Linguistics major Andrea Hernandez Morales became certified to teach ESL, and boned up her skills teaching ESL to migrant workers in Adrian, Michigan. Way to put your knowledge of Linguistics to good use to help out a community in need!

Super-senior Tony Natoci spent his summer doing research and other tasks. In his own words:

--I began work on a paper with Sam Epstein that will expand on my 615 term paper from last winter term. In it we hope to expose an inconsistency between two well known (but not as of yet thought of as conflicting) theories of chain-based quantifier scope interpretation.

--I did the dirty work (experiment coding, some experimentation, stimulus/token production, other odds and ends) for Andries's nasal assimilation project. The research question being asked, in a nutshell, is whether or not listeners can perceptually compensate for nasal place assimilation in phrases like "aspirin powder," where the word-final nasal /n/ is often pronounced as [m] because of the following labial consonant. We are also manipulating the speech rate of the phrases being presented to the listener (increasing the speech of each phrase by 20-40%) to see if speech rate affects this perceptual process. Early returns on the data suggest that it does. YAY!

--I've also done a lot of work with ultrasound imaging. I helped Jon Yip, a third-year graduate student, align his ultrasound frames with their auditory counterparts, a time consuming but essential step, especially for Jon's project, which explores the timing of articulatory gestures in modern Greek. I've also been working for Andries and Pam on their own project involving ultrasound images of the tongue. My task here has been to draw point-by-point tongue contours with the help of the contouring program EdgeTrak. It's tedious work (as with all ultrasound research, as you may be gathering), but the ultimate reward - millisecond by millisecond data showing exactly where and how the tongue moves during speech - makes the process worthwhile.

Senior Emily Reimann also worked on research. She worked with Acrisio Pires on bilingualism and 2nd language acquisition experiments, scrambling, and wh-question constructions. As part of the job, she tutored a research assistant in basic syntax, and sat in on group research meetings. She recently headed to Turkey for a conference in Turkish linguistics to gather information for her honors thesis.

And finally, we have more research from senior Carl Veshka. Carl spent this Summer conducting research on syllable contact in Korean. In Korean, there is a syllabification process that results in a tautosyllabic consonant cluster onset in a succeeding syllable. Carl established that this type of syllabification occurs in Korean in order to satisfy proper syllable contact in Korean. He took this research a step further looking at the production of made-up [CVNGVC]- words (where N stands for nasal and G stands for glide) in Korean. In this study he set out to determine whether the nasal stop in [CV.NGVC]- words surfaced as an alveolar nasal stop or a palatal nasal stop. The study showed that nasal stops in [CV.NGVC]- indeed are palatal and not alveolar. Hypothesizing about why this place change occurs is still in progress.

Congratulations to all of our seniors who spent their summer doing something academic and productive. Keep up the good work!