What's Happening in York Psycholinguistics

Grillo et al. at HSP2022

The 35th meeting of the Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP2022, née CUNY) will be taking place this Thursday (24/03) through Saturday (26/03). This year, York will be represented by Nino Grillo, who will be presenting joint work with Kook-Hee Gil (Sheffield), Heather Marsden, Nina Radkevich, Shayne Sloggett, George Tsoulas, and Norman Yeo. Their talk is titled "Properties of L1 experiential marking asymmetrically modulate the acquisition of Ever and Any in Chinese and Korean L2 speakers of English."

HSP2022 is an entirely virtual conference, and attendance is free! However, the organisers do ask that you register via this link. To see a public-facing programme of events, see here. It looks to be an exciting lineup this year!

Chodroff in Zurich

Eleanor Chodroff's on the road this week, delivering a talk in the Department of Computational Linguistics Lunch Meeting at the University of Zurich this Tuesday (22/03). Her talk is titled "Between maximal structure and maximal bricolage: Identifying universal constraints on phonetic realisation." You can find out more information about this event, including how to join in, here.

Baltasani, Coleman, Passoni, & Przedlacka in Press

In a collaborative work with the folks from the Oxford Phonetics lab, Elisa Passoni has recently had a paper accepted in the Special Issue of Language and Speech on Language Contact and Speaker Accommodation. The paper is titled "Echoes of past contact: Venetian influence on Cretan Greek intonation." Congratulations, all, and can't wait to see this paper in print!

A Grant for Laing, Keren-Portnoy, and Slocombe 

Congratulations to Catherine Laing, Tamar Keren-Portnoy, and Katie Slocombe (Psychology) on their receipt of a British Academy small grant for their project "Babble development and caregiver speech in English and Ugandan babies." Looking forward to seeing this project develop!

Colloquium (16/03; 16:00): Katie Slocombe (University of York)

For our final colloquium of the term, we'll be hearing from Katie Slocombe, who comes to us from the Department of Psychology right here at York! Katie's talk is titled "A Cross-cultural approach to Infant-Directed Speech," and you can find more information about it, and a brief abstract, on the department events page. This talk will be hosted via zoom. To join in, follow this link. All are welcome!

Experimental Labs Meeting: Grillo et al. (17/03; 14:00; SLB/104)

With the term wrapping up, we've got time to squeeze in one last experimental labs meeting. This week, we'll be hearing from Nino Grillo and colleagues on the topic "Properties of L1 experiential marking asymmetrically modulate the acquisition of Ever and Any in Chinese and Korean L2 speakers of English." This is a practice presentation for the upcoming Conference on Human Sentence Processing (HSP 2022). This means the target duration for the talk is about 20 minutes, so we should have plenty of time for a bit of socialising over nibbles afterwards!

Colloquium (09/03; 16:00): Ben Gibb-Reid (University of York) & Mohammad Bani Younes (Al Al-Bayt University)

We've got a double header of a colloquium this week with back-to-back presentations from current PhD candidate Ben Gibb-Reid, and York alumnus Mohammad Bani Younes (Al Al-Bayt University). Ben's talk is titled "Just can’t get enough: The phonetic variation of 'just' with  applications to forensic voice comparison," while Mohammad will be talking to us about "A Universal typology of the disambiguation of disjunctive questions." Both talks will take place via zoom. All are welcome!

Experimental Labs Meeting: Sascha Schäfer (10/03; 14:00; SLB/205)

We're back in Spring Lane building this week, albeit in a slightly different room (SLB/205), where we'll be hearing from Sascha Schäfer about his work on "Assessing the individual voice recognition skills of earwitnesses." An abstract for Sascha's presentation can be found here. As usual, light refreshment will be provided, and all are welcome!

No Colloquium

There is no linguistics colloquium this week. Justin Lo's (UCL) talk has been postponed to 11th May. A reminder of this event will be posted here in the preceding week.

Experimental Labs Meeting: Margherita Belia (03/03; 14:00; SLB/102)

We're back to meeting in person this week with a presentation from Margherita Belia. You'll find the title and a brief abstract for her presentation below. We'll be returning to Spring Lane Building for this meeting, this time in room 102. Light refreshments will be provided, and all are welcome!

Word form generalisation across voices: the role of infant sleep

During sleep, new memories are consolidated and integrated into existing knowledge based common features in past and new experiences. This study investigates how sleep and naps respectively support infant recognition of new word forms across different voices. This ability requires memorising common auditory features within a pool of variable acoustic instances and has been found to be still developing at 7.5 months of age. After familiarising 7.5- to 8.5-month-olds to several tokens of two nonwords, we test infants’ recognition of those nonwords across different voices, both after a nap, or a similarly long wake interval, and on the following day. If a single nap sufficiently supports recognition, napping after exposure to the nonwords produced by the same speaker should increase infants’ chances of recognising them produced by a novel speaker already after one daytime nap. However, if naps combined with overnight sleep are critical, recognition of the nonwords in another voice should be observed only 24 hours after first exposure and only in infants who napped after first exposure.

Lab meetings past: Eleanor Chodroff

Last week we heard from Eleanor Chodroff about her work with Christian Stilp replicating Ladefoged and Broadbent (1957). For those who weren't able to make it, you can find a handy writeup of the project here!

Colloquium (23/02; 16:00): Chiara Gambi (Cardiff University)

Our linguistics colloquium series resumes this week with a talk from Chiara Gambi (Cardiff) titled "Predicting to learn? The role of prediction (error) in children’s language processing and acquisition." The talk will take place at 16:00 on Wednesday via zoom. You can find a brief abstract for the talk on the department events page.

Experimental Labs Meeting: Eleanor Chodroff (24/02; 14:00)

We have a slight shakeup in our planned lab meeting for this week, with Eleanor Chodroff taking over to talk about her recent work replicating Ladefoged & Broadbent (1957) in a transatlantic setting. Unlike our usual lab meetings, this one will be conducted over zoom. Join in here!

Longobardi at IGG 47

Pino continues his travels with not one, but two talks this week at the 47th meeting of Incontro di Grammatica Generativa, taking place in Catania, Italy. You can find copies of the abstracts for these talks here and here, and be sure to check out their programme for what looks to be a very interesting set of presentations!

Reading week

Reading week is upon us, which means no colloquium and no lab meeting! Events resume a week from Wednesday with a colloquium delivered by Chiara Gambi (Cardiff University), followed by a presentation in lab meeting Thursday by Elisa Passoni. Reminders for these events will go out next Monday.

Longobardi and colleagues in Cambridge

Pino Longobardi will be delivering not one, but two presentations this coming Friday (18/02) in Cambridge. The first is joint work with Cristina Guardiano and Paola Crisma titled "The Coding of Syntactic Diversity." The second presentation, "Probing prehistorical language relationships with the PCM," is coauthored with Andrea Ceolin, Cristina Guardiano, and Monica Irimia. See the links above for the presentation abstracts. Safe travels, Pino!

AMLaP 2022 website goes live

Following up on our announcement from last week, we're pleased to announce that the conference website is now live! Head over to amlap2022.york.ac.uk to find out more about our special session on "integrating expectations across levels of representations" and see our list of invited speakers, and feel free to follow us on twitter!

Experimental Labs Schedule

We've got a schedule for the rest of term, and it looks to be an exciting lineup. While we couldn't secure a fixed room, all meetings will be taking place in the Spring Lane Building, Thursday 14:00-15:30. See below for our schedule this term:

• 10/02: Nino Grillo & Shayne Sloggett (SLB/104)

• 24/02: Elisa Passoni (SLB/104)

• 03/03: Margherita Belia (SLB/102)

• 10/03: Sascha Schäfer (SLB/205)

• 17/03: Nino Grillo (SLB/104)

To add these, and other lab-related events to your calendar, you can subscribe to the Experimental Labs Group Calendar. We do our best to keep this calendar up-to-date, but if there's ever an event you think is missing, please contact psycholinguistics-enquiries@york.ac.uk and we'll get to it ASAP!

Colloquium (09/02; 16:00): Monika Schmid (University of York)

This week we'll be hearing from our very own Monika Schmid, who recently joined us as head of department. Monika will be delivering a talk titled "Language attrition: myth, affectation or fact?" You can join in here, and find an abstract for the talk on the department events page. Welcome, Monika, and looking forward to hearing about your work!

Experimental Labs Meeting: Grillo & Sloggett (10/02; 14:00; SLB/104)

For our inaugural meeting of the term, Nino Grillo and Shayne Sloggett will be leading a discussion of the implications of the existence of an "ambiguity advantage" for languages in which true relative clause structures are systematically ambiguous with "pseudo" relative clauses. We'll be providing some background on the issues, and then opening up the floor to think a bit more about whether previous findings need revisited and to explore potential follow-ups.  We'll be meeting in Spring Lane Building 104, 14:00-15:30. As usual, light refreshments will be provided!

Kisjes, Grillo, Schaeffer, & Adani in Leiden

Nino Grillo and colleagues presented work at Grote Taaldag 2022 at the University of Leiden last week. The talk was titled "Relative clause attachment preferences and the effect of pseudo-relatives in Dutch," and builds on Nino's previous work on processing of pseudo-relatives in languages like Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and French. If you'd like to know more, ask us in lab meeting Thursday!

ACTL 2022: June 27–July 1, 2022

The Language and Linguistics Science department will be hosting the Advanced Core Training in Linguistics (ACTL) summer school June 27 through July 1, 2022. ACTL is an annual, five day training programme for advancing students in linguistics sponsored by the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Essex, Oxford, Queen Mary University of London, SOAS, UCL, and York. This year, we're pleased to be hosting four distinguished instructors in the areas of Phonology, Psycholinguistics, Semantics, and Syntax:

• Andrew Nevis (UCL; Phonology)

• Jesse Harris (UCLA; Psycholinguistics)

• Ilaria Frana (Universeity of Enna "Kore"; Semantics)

• Jim McCloskey (UCSC; Syntax)

Watch this space for information about registration and attendance, and keep up with developments on the ACTL website!

AMLaP 28: September 7–9, 2022

We're thrilled to announce that LLS, together with the departments of Education and Psychology, will be hosting the 28th meeting of Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing September 7–9, 2022. AMLaP is the premier conference for interdisciplinary psycholinguistics in Europe, and it's very exciting to be hosting it (again!) in York. While we hope to be able to host this event in-person, we're gathering information from the community about the possibilities for virtual/hybrid events. If you'd like to make your thoughts known, please complete this brief survey before Friday, 11th February. 

Colloquium (02/02; 16:00): Asli Özyürek (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics)

Our department colloquium series resumes this week with a talk Wednesday from Asli Özyürek (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) titled "A multimodal turn in language sciences." You can join in here, and find an abstract for the talk on the department events page.

Experimental Labs Meeting (Thursdays, 14:00-15:30)

The final schedule for lab meeting is still being worked out, but it seems that there's a general consensus for meeting on Thursdays 14:00-15:30. There is no meeting this week, but watch this space for more information about upcoming presentations!

Wallenberg in Edinburgh

Joel Wallenberg headed to the Univeresity of Edinburgh this Tuesday to give a talk with Rachel Bailes at the Centre for Language Evolution. The talk was titled "Information uniformity in linguistic planning: form and function for noise resistance." Hope the talk was well received, and you got lots of interesting questions!

Experimental Labs Meeting Resumes

We're set to resume our lab meetings from next week (31/01). To find the best time for all of us, this google form has been distributed to the experimental labs mailing list. If you haven't received that email but would like to regularly attend our lab meetings, feel free to submit your responses! (N.b. you'll need to sign into your York account to complete the form.) To be added to the experimental labs mailing list, please contact psychlinguistics-enquiries@york.ac.uk.

Stats Coffee Hour Back in Action (Mondays, 12:00-13:00; V/B/213)

Continuing our theme of resurrected events, our weekly statistics coffee hour is back starting Monday 31st January. These meetings are surgeries where staff and students can come with targeted questions for our local statistics experts. PGR and staff members requiring more in-depth, one-on-one support should contact linguistics-statistics@york.ac.uk to arrange a meeting. The coffee hour convenes Mondays, 12:00-13:00 in the psycholinguistics lab (V/B/213). For more information about statistics support in the department, please see the LLS Data Science and Statistics Handbook.

Gully Goes Viral

Over the holiday, Amelia Gully was interviewed for a Tom Scott YouTube feature about Electrical Network Frequency Analysis; a technique whereby analysts use signal processing to determine the time and date of a recording based on background electrical noise. To learn more about this process (and to see Amelia in action!) head over to the video here!

Final WHYPs of 2021

This is the final WHYPs update of 2021! We'll see you back here in the first week of Spring term, 2022.

Experimental Labs Social (09/12; V/C/109)

We'll be convening at a slightly different time this week (12:00-14:00) to fête ourselves with a lab social. This will be an entirely informal, potluck-style social event, so feel free to filter in and out as your schedule allows. Light refreshments will be provided, but attendees are encouraged to add to the spread. All are welcome!

Chodroff at Rutgers (09/12; 15:00-18:00)

This Thursday (09/12), Eleanor Chodroff will be delivering an online workshop on "Phonetic forced alignment with the Montreal Forced Aligner" in the department of Spanish and Portuguese at Rutgers University. The workshop will begin at 15:00 UK time, and will last until 18:00, including breaks. You can find a description of the workshop here, along with information about how to join in on the zoom meeting. For queries about the workshop, please contact Eleanor directly.

Colloquium (30/11; 16:00): Charlotte Moore (Concordia University)

Our department colloquium is on a Tuesday this week, and we'll be hearing from Charlotte Moore (Concordia) in a talk titled "Variable language, adaptable learners: evidence that language acquisition is robust to noise at two timescales." You can join in here, and find an abstract for the talk on the department events page (n.b. the department page lists the wrong date!).

No Experimental Labs Meeting

After a long term, we all deserve a bit of a break, so there is no experimental labs meeting scheduled for this week. Instead, a survey has been distributed to the experimental labs mailing list regarding a social event either this week or next. If you have not received this survey, but would like to, please reach out to psycholinguistics-enquires@york.ac.uk. All are welcome!

Laing, Khattab, Sloggett, & Keren-Portnoy in (pre)Press

Congratulations to Catherine Laing and co. whose paper "Size sound symbolism in mothers' speech to their infants" has just been in-principle accepted as a registered report in the Journal of Child Language. A preliminary version of the paper, pending data collection, may be found here. Best of luck with participant recruitment; we look forward to seeing this manuscript in print!

Colloquium (24/11; 16:00): Bettelou Los (University of Edinburgh)

Bettelou Los (Edinburgh) is speaking this week in the department's colloquium series. Bettelou's talk is titled "A data-driven exploration of stylistic variation in historical English," and will take place on zoom. You can join in here, and find an abstract for the talk on the department events page.

Experimental Labs Meeting (25/11; DL/117): Joel Wallenberg

After struggling with locked doors in Grimstone House, we're relocating this week's meeting to Derwent College (D/L/117). Joel Wallenberg will be leading discussion this week with a look at his work on "Information spread in language and memory." You can read a bit about Joel's presentation below.

This talk presents some published and some very preliminary findings on the spread of information across sentences, the function of spreading information, and a possible analogue (or related mechanism) in episodic memory. The work builds on a growing tradition of research on information theory (Hartley 1928, Shannon 1948, etc.) and the modulation of information in different linguistic structures, beginning with Fenk & Fenk (1980) and subs., Aylett & Turk (2004), Levy (2005), and much subsequent work. In particular, we pursue the hypothesis that speakers prefer to disperse high information items as evenly as possible across sentences, as a way of mitigating the effects of noise on communication. This work takes a slightly different angle that previous research, however, in considering the order of information as it affects its spread, independent of the length of sentences. I'll also present some preliminary data suggesting that the the episodic memory system, particularly "recollection", prefers a similar solution to the same problem.

York Linguistics in PhilSoc (26/11; 16:00-18:30)

This Friday (26/11), Sam Hellmuth will be hosting an online PhilSoc research event focused on "Corpus approaches to phonetic~phonological variability and stability." The event features Ben Molineaux (Edinburgh), Eleanor Chodroff (Language and Linguistic Science), and PhD alumnus Justin Lo (UCL). For a full schedule of events, as well as more information about talk titles and abstracts, see here.

To attend this event, register on Eventbrite by the end of Thursday, 25th November. A zoom link will be provided to registrants.

Kume & Marsden in Press

A new paper by Keisuke Kume and Heather Marsden has recently appeared in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. The paper is titled "L2 acquisition of definiteness in Japanese floating numeral quantifiers: Can overt L1 morphology help?" and can be found here. Congratulations Keisuke and Heather!

Brown at Stony Brook University

Last Friday (19/11), Dunstan Brown presented on "Using word vectors to understand Russian lexemes: defectiveness and case-number paradigms" at Stony Brook University. This talk represents a collaboration with co-authors Yu-Ying Chuang (Tübingen), Roger Evans (Brighton) and Harald Baayen (Tübingen). The talk was well received with lots of interesting questions!

York to host AMLaP 2022

We're very excited to announce that we're collaborating with the departments of Psychology and Education to host AMLaP (Architectures and Mechanisms for Language Processing) in September 2022. AMLaP is the premier interdisciplinary language processing conference in Europe, and the sister event to the North American conference on Human Sentence Processing (née "CUNY"). There are lots of decisions to be made (venues to be booked, speakers to invite, etc.), but we look forward to showing off all the things York has to offer! 

Unfortunately, due to the time commitment of planning a conference of this scale, we will be cancelling UKAMP this year. We'll recommence our grand plans for a UK area meeting in psycholinguistics in 2023. Plans for the ACTL summer school remain unaffected.

Colloquium (17/11; 16:00): Wataru Uegaki (University of Edinburgh)

Wataru Uegaki (Edinburgh) is our speaker this week in the department's colloquium series. Wataru's talk is titled "The informativeness/complexity trade-off in the domain of Boolean connectives," and will take place on zoom. You can join in here, and find an abstract for the talk on the department events page.

Experimental Labs Meeting (18/11; VX/230): Liang Zhao

We're back in our new space (VX/230) this coming Thursday at our usual time (12:30). This week, Liang Zhao will be telling us about her work on "Top-Down and Bottom-up Processing of Familiar and Unfamiliar Mandarin Dialect Tone Systems." You can find a brief description of her work below.

In the present study, we investigate the relative weighting of top-down expectedness and bottom-up lexical tone in the perception of familiar and unfamiliar lexical tone systems. Standard Mandarin and Chengdu Mandarin are mutually intelligible language varieties with comparable segmental and highly distinct tonal realizations. In a spoken semantic-plausibility judgment task, we manipulated whether a word was high-surprisal or low-surprisal given the preceding context and dialect-specific tone. Speakers of Standard Mandarin showed lower accuracy judging Chengdu Mandarin, but showed uniform effects of surprisal in reaction times to both dialects. This suggests that speakers are aware of the surprisal conveyed by a non-standard tone, even if they do not use this information in making their final decision.

Longobardi at VARINT21

Pino Longobardi will be representing York at the Workshop on Linguistic Variation at the Interfaces (VARINT 21) in Barcelona this Thursday (18/11). Along with his coauthors, Pino will be giving a talk titled "Syntactic phylogenies and the structure of the language faculty," taking a quantitative look at historical syntactic similarity across different language families and its consequences for a cognitive theory of the language faculty. You can find a copy of the talk slides here.

Chodroff in Sheffield 

Eleanor Chodroff heads to Sheffield this Friday (19/11) to present in the Natural Language Processing research group on her work "Large-scale structure in phonetic realization." Happy travels, Eleanor, and hope you get lots of good questions!

Colloquium (10/11; 16:00): Sean Roberts (Cardiff University)

We're back to our regular schedule this week, and starting us off in the department colloquium is Sean Roberts of Cardiff University,  who will be talking about "Using causal graphs to explain linguistic phenomena." Sean's talk will take place on zoom, and you can join in here. An abstract for the talk can be found on the department events page.

Experimental Labs Meeting (11/11; VX/230): Heather Marsden

After a two week hiatus, our lab meeting is back! This coming Thursday (11/11; 12:30; VX/230) we'll be hearing from Heather Marsden about her work-in-progress on "Investigating the effect of training on the processing and comprehension of case in L2 German." Here's a brief description of Heather's presentation:

This project investigates whether in-class training can facilitate predictive processing in L2 German learners. I will give an overview of the study design and results from several tasks including visual world eye tracking tasks. Suggestions for next steps in analysing the eye tracking data are welcome!

PGR Stats Club (11/11; V/B/213)

The brand new LLS stats club will be holding their inaugural meeting this Thursday, 11/11 at 15:00 in the psycholinguistics lab (V/B/213). The stats club is a student led meeting where our PGRs get together to compare notes on data analysis techniques. All students are welcome! To be added to the stats club mailing list, please contact Jamie Abbott.

Gully in SoVoT (12/11; 11:30)

Amelia Gully will be hosting a network session in Sounds, Voices, and Technology (SoVoT) this coming Friday on the subject of "Voice." Amelia's session is titled "Anatomy, acoustics and the individual," and you can find a copy of the abstract here. For information about how to join in, please consult this google calendar. All are welcome!

Reading Week

We're taking a breather this week and have neither a scheduled colloquium nor a lab meeting. We'll resume normal operations next week with a colloquium from Sean Roberts (Cardiff University), and a presentation in lab meeting by Heather Marsden. Stay tuned for more information!

York Linguistics at BUCLD 46

The 46th annual Boston University Conference on Language Development takes place this week on the 4th-7th November. BUCLD is one of the largest language development conferences in North America, and is highly competitive. This year, York Linguistics will be represented by Catherine Laing, Keisuke Kume, and Heather Marsden: 

• Laing, "Exploring systematicity in the developing lexicon with phonological networks", 04/11, 15:00 GMT

• Kume & Marsden, "L2 acquisition of the Japanese associative plural marker tati", 05/11, 15:00 GMT

BUCLD will be held entirely virtually, and registration is free for students. For more information about attending the conference, see here.

Passoni in Munich

This Wednesday (03/11), Elisa Passoni will be presenting her work on "Gendered L1 attrition and L2 acquisition of pitch range in Japanese-English sequential bilinguals" at the Institute of Phonetic Speech Processing in Munich. An abstract for Elisa's talk can be found here. 

Chodroff in Manchester

Eleanor Chodroff headed to Manchester last week to deliver a talk in the department of Linguistics and English Language. The talk was titled "Between maximal bricolage and maximal structure: Identifying constraints on phonetic realization." You can find the abstract of the talk on Manchet.

Brown in Ohio

Dunstan Brown delivered a colloquium in the linguistics department at Ohio State University last Friday, 29th October. The talk, titled "Investigating Sims’ conjecture: looking at the distributional semantics of Russian defective nouns," represents joint work with Yu-Ying Chuang (Tübingen), Roger Evans (Brighton), Jule Weber (Tübingen) and Harald Baayen (Tübingen). An abstract for Dunstan's talk may be found here.

Colloquium (27/10; 16:00): Adam Chong (Queen Mary University of London)

This week in the department colloquium, we'll be hearing from Adam Chong of Queen Mary University of London about "Aspects of Singapore English Intonation." The talk will take place on zoom, and you can join in here. An abstract for the talk can be found on the department events page.

Experimental Labs Meeting (28/10; VX/230): Fani Karageorgou

We'll be meeting again this coming Thursday (28/10) at 12:30 in VX/230. This will be our meeting location for the rest of this term. This week we'll be hearing from Fani Karageorgou, who's provided the title and abstract below.

Memory retrieval and filler gap dependencies

An overview of my research so far, exploring the (lack of) effects of retrieval interference in filler gap dependency resolution. My presentation will focus on the investigation of the results of two influential studies Van Dyke & McElree (2006) and Cunnings & Sturt (2018), which are taken to support that any element stored in memory can interfere with dependency formation, independently from structural restrictions. I will be presenting the results of some follow up experiments testing these effects, as well as my future plans.

Marsden & Kume at J-SLA 2021

This past weekend, Heather Marsden and Keisuke Kume presentated at the 21s International Conference of the Japan Second Language Association. Heather delivered an invited lecture titled "Ambient input, instructed input, and absent input: A reflection on L2 acquisition in different input conditions.” Keisuke presented joint work with Heather on "L2 acquisition of definiteness marking by Japanese demonstrative sono" as a poster. Congratulations, both, and hope you got lots of interesting questions!

pcIBEX Templates

The folks behind pcIBEX (the PennController for internet based experiments) are at it again: in an effort to build a public database of useable experiment templates, they're now accepting requests for new designs that they can help you implement. So, if you've got an experiment that you think you'd like to run over the internet, but aren't quite sure how to get it set up, check out their template request form!

Schedule Update

There's been a bit of a shuffle in our lab calendar to accommodate presenters who have conflicts with our 12:30 time on some Thursdays. You can find the up-to-date schedule here.

Colloquium (20/10; 16:00): Christina Kim (University of Kent)

This week in the department colloquium, we'll be hearing from Christina Kim of the University of Kent about "Linguistic and social drivers of structural convergence in dialogue." The talk will take place on zoom, and you can join in here. An abstract for the talk can be found on the department events page.

Experimental Labs Meeting (21/10; SLB/210): Jamie Abbott

We'll be meeting again this coming Thursday (14/10) at 12:30 in Spring-Lane Building 210. This week we'll be hearing from Jamie Abbott, who'll be telling us about some of what he's been up to lately. A title and abstract are given below.

When number doesn't count

This presentation gives an overview of my research as a Masters student and introduces next steps now the PhD journey has begun. I will be talking about working memory in the processing of non-local dependencies: while research has indicated that comprehenders hold onto information about the animacy of a Noun Phrase whilst navigating open dependencies, a self-paced reading (Maze) task did not provide evidence that information about a noun's Number is maintained by the parser in this way. Future avenues of investigation will look to replicate previous findings across different experimental methods, as well as manipulating the languages, syntactic features and length of dependency to build towards an understanding of cross-linguistic feature maintenance and decay during comprehension.

Speech Science Forum (21/10; 16:00): Bodo Winter (University of Birmingham)

In an event that may be of interest to our Psycholingiustics group, Bodo Winter will be speaking in the Speech Science Forum at UCL about "Statistics in linguistics and phonetics: Thoughts on independence and generalizability."  The talk will take place on zoom at 16:00 on Thursday, 21st October. You can join in at this link.

Autumn 2021 Schedule

The schedule for Autumn 2021 is now finalized. You can find the full schedule of events, including lab meetings and colloquia, on our lab calendar.

Colloquium (13/10; 16:00): Keren-Portnoy & Hellmuth

It's a double-header in the department colloquium this week, with talks from Tamar Keren-Portnoy and Sam Hellmuth. Tamar will be discussing how infants learn to interact with voice-activated apps in a talk titled: "‘Did I just do that?’: Six-month-olds learn to operate an app with their voice." Sam will present her work on intonational variation and change in York English, in collaboration with Ciara Farrelly: "Intonational variation and change in York English." Both talks will take place on zoom, and you can join in here. For more information about these talks, please see the department events page.

Experimental Labs Meeting (14/10; SLB/210): Research agendas & half-baked ideas

We'll be meeting again this coming Thursday (14/10) at 12:30 in Spring-Lane Building 210. There is no formal presentation scheduled for this meeting. Instead, we'll take the opportunity to welcome newcomers to the department and say a bit about our various research programs. We'd love to know what you all are up to! 

In the event of extra time, we'll also be able to talk about any half-baked ideas we have for future work. So bring your zaniest thoughts, and let's see what we can cook up!

As usual, light refreshment will be provided.

Laing at BUCLD 2021

Catherine Laing will be presenting her work "Exploring systematicity in the developing lexicon with phonological networks" at the 46th Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) on 4th November. For information about how to virtually attend BUCLD and watch Catherine's talk, see the BUCLD website (pre-registration for students is free!). Congratulations, and best of luck, Catherine!

Keren-Portnoy in Infancy

Congratulations to Tamar Keren-Portnoy for her paper "'Did I just do that?'—Six-month-olds learn the contingency between their vocalizations and a visual reward in 5 minutes," which was recently published in the journal Infancy along with co-authors Helena Daffern, Rory DePaolis, Christopher Cox, Ken Brown, Florence Oxley, and Mona Kanaan. A copy of the article can be found here.

Wallenberg joins department

We are pleased to welcome Dr. Joel Wallenberg as a senior lecturer in language change. Before joining us, Joel was a lecturer at Newcastle University, where he remains an affiliate in the Centre for Behaviour and Evolution (CBE). Currently, he is investigating Constraints on the Adaptiveness of Information In Language, in collaboration with Christine Cuskley and Rachael Bailes.

Welcome, Joel!

Experimental labs meeting resumes! (07/10/21; 14:30; B/M/23)

The first meeting of the 2021/22 academic year will be taking place this coming Thursday (07/10) at 14:30 in B/M/23. We'll be using this first meeting to discuss general scheduling decisions, meeting content, and the content of this website! Light refreshments will be provided.

Abbott wins White Rose Fellowship

Incoming PhD student Jamie Abbott has been awarded a White Rose College of Arts and Humanities fellowship for his project investigating the functions of memory during sentence processing. This extremely competitive fellowship is awarded by the White Rose Consortium, a collaborative agency linking the Universities of Leeds, Sheffield and York. Congratulations Jamie!

Dr. Catherine Laing joins department

We are very excited to announce that Dr. Catherine Laing will be joining us as a lecturer in language development starting September 2021. Dr. Laing completed her PhD in linguistics here at the University of York, and has since been a post-doctoral researcher at Duke University, and a lecturer in the Centre for Language and Communication Research at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on early language development, with an emphasis on how infants transition from babble to speech.  She is currently part of a multi-institution project on the role of sound-size symbolism in word learning in collaboration with Drs. Tamar Keren-Portnoy, Ghada Khattab (Newcastle University), and Shayne Sloggett. 

Welcome, Catherine!