58th Language at Edinburgh lunch

The Language@Edinburgh Lunch is a bi-monthly opportunity to present your work to an interdisciplinary audience in an intimate and feedback-rich setting, all while enjoying a buffet lunch.

Posters by both postgraduate students and academic staff are welcome on any area of human language research - including all sub-fields of linguistics, philosophy of language, natural language processing, psycholinguistics, and any other language related discipline. Reporting on work in progress is equally welcome.

If you would like to present your language-related research, please email us with a title and an abstract by Thursday 15 June and a digital version (pdf) of your poster by Monday 19 June, which we will print for you and you will get to take home at the end.

We would ask you to mind these few guidelines when preparing your abstract:

• aim at about 100-300 words in length (including any example sentences and references)
• if linguistic examples are glossed, they should follow the common Leipzig Glossing Rules
• the abstract may be sent within an email message or as an attachment (doc/docx or txt are fine)
• if not using plain text, kindly refrain from using formatting that is prone to causing errors or getting lost between conversions (e.g., tabs, small caps; automatic indentation, bullets and numbering).

Posters

The influence of temporal context on the production of temporal morphology in L2 speakers of English - Qingyuan Gardner

English temporal morphology is used to express tense (temporal location of events in relation to the time of speech). Mandarin does not have such a temporal system expressed through inflectional morphology (Smith, 1991). Specifically, Mandarin expresses temporality via aspect (internal temporal constituency of events) alone. The absence of L1 temporal morphology prompts the question: What is the state of acquisition for L2 speakers without such a system in their L1?

We investigate L2 production data among adult native Mandarin speakers of English. Since Mandarin does not use a morphological system to overtly mark tense, this population is, according to previous research, particularly prone to L2 morphological variability in production (Lardiere, 1998; Hawkins & Liszka, 2003). The key aim of this study is to observe patterns of L2 morphological errors in production (both omissions and incorrect use of morphological markers) in native Mandarin speakers under distinct temporal contexts. We will examine this data against current theories of L2 morphological omission (Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Prevost & White, 2000; Chondrogianni & Marinis, 2012). We aim to discover also, whether temporal context could act as a predictor on the accuracy of L2 morphological production amongst this population. More specifically, could temporal context affect different types of L2 morphology differently?

Parsing wh-questions: Evidence from L1-Greek adults and implications for bilingual processing - Katerina Pantoula

Comprehension of syntactic dependencies has been found to differ in monolingual and bilingual language acquirers. This difference has triggered controversy about the nature of developmental processing pathways in the two populations. Recent offline studies on the acquisition of syntactic dependencies revealed persistent difficulties with the comprehension of wh-questions in children. The presence and position of case-marking cues has been proposed to facilitate the felicitous resolution of ambiguous wh-questions in monolingual children (German: Roesch & Chondrogianni, 2015; Greek: Sauerland et al., 2016). To date, only one offline study has investigated how bilingual children comprehend wh-questions when mediated by the number and position of case-marking cues (Roesch & Chondrogianni, 2016). In terms of online processing studies, only one time course study examined the processing of wh-questions in L1-Korean monolingual children (Choi & Trueswell, 2010). They found that the presence and position of case-marking cues guide children to resolve ambiguous clausal structure. Putting the bits and pieces together, offline research provided us with patterns; yet, it does not show the processes that underlie incremental parsing.

We use a real-time visual-world eye tracking task to investigate Greek referential which-questions. Participants (n=10) (m = 20 years) looked at picture animal triplets while listening to the target question (object: Which squirrel does the rabbit cover in the evening?). They were instructed to click on the target animal referent that responses the question. Offline behavioural data (percentages of proportion of looks to the target referent) showed that acquirers tended to look more at the neuter ambiguous which-phrase that denotes patient semantic role. The results indicate that acquirers were more likely to not felicitously resolve the ambiguity when morphosyntactic cues arrived late in the sentence.

A Phonological Profile of Daqing Nuosu Yi - Yubin Zhang

This working paper provides a brief description of the phonological system of Daqing Nuosu Yi, a Nuosu Yi variety spoken in Daqing Township, Xichang, China. It is classified as belonging to the Sondi dialect of Nuosu Yi.

The canonical syllabic structure of Daqing Nuosu Yi can be represented as (C)V. It has a relatively large consonantal inventory with 41 distinctive consonants. Except nasals and /h/, all the other consonants contrast in voicing. Furthermore, voiceless plosives and affricates contrast in aspiration while voiced ones in prenasalization. Basically, Daqing Nuosu Yi has 5 vowel phonemes: /ɹ̩/, /u/, /ɪ/, /o/, /ɯ/. Its vowel system shows complex interactions with consonants, resulting in the fricativized or apical vowel /ɹ̩/ and some fricativized realizations of the phoneme /u/.

The ‘tense’ and ‘lax’ vocal register contrast, which defined by a constricted or open epilaryngeal tube, is a hallmark of Daqing Nuosu Yi. The laryngeal register as a suprasegmental affects both consonants and vowels. It can change the aerodynamics of consonantal production, leading to the implosive or approximant allophones of obstruents. Moreover, it alters vowel quality significantly, resulting in 5 pairs of ‘lax’ and ‘tense’ vowels: /ɹ̩/, /ɹ̩/; /u/, /u/; /ɪ/, /ɪ/[ɛ]; /o/, /o/[ɔ]; /ɯ/, /ɯ/[a], with the tense ones more open in the vowel space. There is vocal register harmony (or ATR vowel harmony) within constituents, e.g., /vɪ⁵⁵/ pig + /ʣa³³/ food > /vɛ⁵⁵ ʣa³³/ pig feeds. Daqing Nuosu Yi also have lexical tones: 21, 33, (44), 55, with vocal register interactions. The 44 tone sandhi appears to be prosodically or syntactically driven. We await future articulatory studies and perceptual studies to unveil a clearer picture of the complex interactions between vowels and consonants, segments and vocal registers, tones and vocal registers.

Referential Choice and Executive Function in Japanese-English Bilingual Children - Maki Kubota

The current study investigated the relationship between executive function and referential choice in Japanese-English bilingual children. Choosing an appropriate reference requires the speaker to take the listener’s perspective into account--a process that is hypothesised to involve cognitive load. Our aim was to determine whether executive function is a contributing factor to variance in referential choice for bilingual children in both their first language and second language. Thirty-eight Japanese-English sequential bilingual returnee children (mean age 9:8) participated in the study. Participants listened to short stories in Japanese and in English, involving either a referent switch or a non-switch, and were then asked to interpret the reference of an ambiguous pronoun. They were also tested on a battery of executive function tests (Simon, Advanced DCCS, and N-back). Bilingual Language Experience Calculator (BiLEC) was administered to the parents in order to quantify their language input. First, the results show that there was a main effect for story type and English proficiency, highlighting that (1) referent switch stories had lower accuracy than non-switch and (2) advanced group had significantly higher accuracy than basic group in both language tasks. Second, there was a main effect of DCCS switch cost (calculated by subtracting mean accurate response times of non-switch trials from switch trials). In other words, participants who had higher DCCS switch cost had lower accuracy in the comprehension task. Third, there was a significant interaction between language and story type, with the difference of accuracy between the switch and non-switch stories to be larger for English than in Japanese. The findings give support for the relationship between executive function and choice of referents. In specific, the switch cost in the Advanced DCCS task - a method designed to measure mental set switching - had relationship with a language task that also requires referent switching. In addition, the results show that switching referent in the less dominant language (i.e., English) requires more cognitive resources than in the dominant language (i.e., Japanese).

Intimations of Interfaces in Russian Information Structure: The Particle že and Y/N- vs Wh-Questions - Tom Wood

I present preliminary results from my PhD project, the aims of which are to: first, formulate a unified analysis of how Russian deploys (1) intonation, (2) discourse particles like že, ved’, and -to, (3) sentence type, and (4) ‘free’ word order, to express the categories of Information Structure; and second, in the process on the one hand to synthesise and verify the disparate data in the literature on the topic(s), and on the other analyse what consequences the whole picture has for what sort of general linguistic framework we might want to entertain.

In the poster I would sketch my present model of how the formal devices (1-4) interface, i.e. through the contextual interaction of their compositional, epistemic-logical contributions to the discourse structure. I cite data on the use of the Russian discourse particle že – with reference to the contrast in its acceptability in neutral Yes-No and Wh-questions noted by Zybatow (1990) – which, combined with initial intuitions about the other three ‘variables’ in the ‘equation’, lend some initial support to my framework and point the way forward to its elaboration.

Embedded Topicalization in Old English: Syntax and Information Structure - Sergio López Martínez (University of Oviedo)

The close relation between discourse and syntax in Old English has been a favourite topic for research over the last few years. However, most of the existent work on the interplay between information structure and syntax in Old English focuses on main sentences, and the instances in which subordinate sentences are studied, it is in relation to the discourse-related particles þa and þonne.

In previous work (López Martínez 2016), I provided data supporting the claim that embedded topicalization is possible in Old English  subordinate sentences, and it was suggested that this phenomenon could be related to discourse factors. I now analyse the main current syntactic theories on V2 word order in Old English, in an attempt to provide a valid syntactic analysis for the examples of potential embedded topicalization that have been found.

Furthermore, I study how discourse factors may influence topicalization in subordinate clauses. In order to do so, a large corpus of prose texts from the OE period has been analysed, examining not only the instances of embedded topicalization in subordinate sentences, but also how discourse affects those topicalized elements. The present study pays attention to whether those elements are given or new information, analysing the discourse preceding the relevant subordinate clauses in relation to the current theories on Information Structure.

Contact

Candice Mathers

Language at Edinburgh Lunch committee

Joachim Fainberg, Andres Karjus, Madeleine Long, Candice Mathers, Joana Ribeiro, Eva-Maria Schnelten

Further information

The Language at Edinburgh Lunch is made possible through funding from the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and the Human Communication Research Centre, with the intent to facilitate interdisciplinary language research at the University of Edinburgh.