Linguistic Society of America Award honours lecturer
Jennifer Culbertson is co-author of paper winning the Best Paper in Language 2017 Award
Congratulations to linguistics lecturer Dr Jennifer Culbertson, who is a co-author of a paper winning the Best Paper in Language 2017 Award from the Linguistic Society of America.
Jennifer is a lecturer in the Centre for Language Evolution here at the School of PPLS. She looks at how languages are shaped by learning and use.
Liaison in French
The paper looks at how children learn lexical forms in French in environments with liaison.
Liaison in French is the pronunciation of the final consonant in a word before a vowel sound. Most of the word-final consonants are not pronounced, for example, the “s” in “les” (the) is normally silent. In liaison, the usually silent final consonants of certain words can be pronounced, for example, “les amis” (the friends) where the “s” is pronounced “z”.
The paper looks at the type of mistakes children make to see how they represent nouns and how this changes over time as the learners’ vocabulary becomes more adult-like.
The Best Paper in Language Award
Each year since 2012, the award is given for the best paper published in the journal Language.