New paper: Pérez, Monahan, and Lambon Ralph (2021)

Alejandro Pérez (former postdoc, now at Cambridge University), Philip J. Monahan (faculty), and colleague Matthew A. Lambon Ralph (Cambridge University) have a new paper in MethodsX, 8: "Joint recording of EEG and audio signals in hyperscanning and pseudo-hyperscanning experiments."

Hyperscanning is an emerging technique that allows for the study of brain similarities between interacting individuals. This methodology has powerful implications for understanding the neural basis of joint actions, such as conversation; however, it also demands precise time-locking between the different brain recordings and sensory stimulation. Such precise timing, nevertheless, is often difficult to achieve. Recording auditory stimuli jointly with the ongoing high temporal resolution neurophysiological signal presents an effective way to control timing asynchronies offline between the digital trigger sent by the stimulation program and the actual onset of the auditory stimulus delivered to participants via speakers/headphones. This configuration is particularly challenging in hyperscanning setups due to the general increased complexity of the methodology. In other designs using the related technique of pseudo-hyperscanning, combined brain-auditory recordings are also a highly desirable feature, since reliable offline synchronization can be performed by using the shared audio signal. Here, we describe two hardware configurations wherein the real-time delivered auditory stimulus is recorded jointly with ongoing electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. Specifically, we describe and provide customized implementations for joint EEG-audio recording in hyperscanning and pseudo-hyperscanning paradigms using hardware and software from Brain Products GmbH.

New paper: Paquette-Smith, Cooper, and Johnson (2020)

Melissa Paquette-Smith (Ph.D. 2018, Department of Psychology, now at the University of California, Los Angeles), Angela Cooper (former postdoc, Department of Psychology, now at BEworks) and Elizabeth Johnson (faculty) have a paper out in the Journal of Child Language, 48(2): "Targeted adaptation in infants following live exposure to an accented talker."

Infants struggle to understand familiar words spoken in unfamiliar accents. Here, we examine whether accent exposure facilitates accent-specific adaptation. Two types of pre-exposure were examined: video-based (i.e., listening to pre-recorded stories; Experiment 1) and live interaction (reading books with an experimenter; Experiments 2 and 3). After video-based exposure, Canadian English-learning 15- to 18-month-olds failed to recognize familiar words spoken in an unfamiliar accent. However, after face-to-face interaction with a Mandarin-accented talker, infants showed enhanced recognition for words produced in Mandarin English compared to Australian English. Infants with live exposure to an Australian talker were not similarly facilitated, perhaps due to the lower vocabulary scores of the infants assigned to the Australian exposure condition. Thus, live exposure can facilitate accent adaptation, but this ability is fragile in young infants and is likely influenced by vocabulary size and the specific mapping between the speaker and the listener's phonological system.

New staff members

As Deem Waham (staff) has recently gone on parental leave and Jennifer McCallum (staff) will be spending the next year working with the Department of Psychology, we have two newcomers in our (currently virtual) department office. Hello to Sara Taghinia (staff), who will be Acting Undergraduate Secretary while Deem is on leave, and to Christopher Lee (staff), who will be serving as Graduate Officer. Welcome!

Research Groups: Friday, April 16

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Michael Friesner (faculty, Department of French) and Laura Kastronic (faculty, Department of French): "Developing sociolinguistic competence in French through the flipped classroom model."

​The flipped classroom approach (cf. Bergmann and Sams 2012), in which class time is largely devoted to collaborative activities, has recently been extended to the second-language classroom. Nonetheless, despite incorporating communicative methods, predominant pedagogical practices, focusing on prescriptive norms and traditional textbook explanations of linguistic phenomena (Mougeon et al. 2010), impart minimal sociolinguistic competence, leaving most second language learners ill-equipped to replicate native-like patterns of variation (cf. Dewaele 2004). Learners therefore overuse hyperstandard, hyperformal, or register-inappropriate forms. We believe that the flipped classroom model is well suited to addressing these challenges for FSL teaching. We therefore draw on variationist sociolinguistic research to foster a deeper understanding of three well-studied phenomena (cf. Mougeon et al. 2010) - negation, expression of future time, and first-person plural address - for which traditional pedagogical explanations diverge considerably from L1 community behaviour. We argue that time outside of the classroom is well spent building sociolinguistic awareness through evidence-driven description, corpus-based realia, and analytical commentary on sociolinguistic implications of variant choice, providing scaffolding for communicative in-class comprehension and production exercises. Additionally, we address questions of the appropriate point of intervention based on perceptions of casual or nonstandard linguistic behaviour by L1 speakers of varying geographic origins. 

1:00 PM - 2:30 PM: Fieldwork Group
Shabri Kapoor (Ph.D.): "The mass/count distinction in Cusco Quechua."

The mass/count distinction is often described as the difference between nouns that represent countable entities (dog/dogs), and uncountable entities such as substances or 'stuff' (water/*waters). Languages that have this distinction often show differences in the features that distinguish count from mass nouns. One such feature is the use of a container classifier when combining numerals with mass nouns (three cups of water). My research explores how the mass/count distinction applies to the Cusco variety of Quechua, and specifically, how container classifiers that combine numerals with mass nouns in Cusco Quechua differ morphologically, depending on classifier type.

50 ans de linguistique à l'UQAM

The Department of Linguistics at l'Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) is celebrating its 50th anniversary, and to mark the occasion, is holding a workshop comparing perspectives on linguistic issues from April 22 through 24.

• Juvenal Ndayiragije (faculty): "Être d'accord ou pas."
• Michael Friesner (faculty, Department of French) and Laura Kastronic (faculty, Department of French): "Le contact communautaire et la réalisation de la voyelle /æ/ dans les emprunts en français montréalais."
• Anna Frolova (faculty, Department of French): "Développement de la transitivité verbale en russe L1."
• Former faculty member Anne-José Villeneuve (University of Alberta) and colleague Davy Bigot (Concordia University): "Ça prend plus qu’un changement de contexte: L’expression de la conséquence en français québécois soutenu."

GLOW 44

The 44th Generative Linguistics in the Old World conference is taking place online from April 15 through 17, hosted by the international team making up the GLOW board. We have two alumni on the program:

• Julie Goncharov (Ph.D. 2015, now at the University of Tromsø) and Lavi Wolf (Ben Gurion University of the Negev): "Polarity and granularity properties of 'some' polarity items and minimizers."
• Neil Banerjee (BA 2016, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Indivisible portmanteaux and the timing of ellipsis."

MOTH 2021

This year's Montréal-Ottawa-Toronto-Hamilton (MOTH) Syntax Workshop is being held online from April 19 through 21, hosted by McMaster University. We have a number of graduate students giving presentations:

• Crystal Chen (MA): "To truck drive or to not truck drive: an analysis of English verbal compounds."
• Christina Duong (MA): "Cantonese ge: The bleached classifier."
• Sophie Harrington (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "'More than a mood': Uniting structure and interpretation through pronominalized complements."
• Justin Leung (MA): "The structure of directional motion events in Cantonese."
• Virgilio Partida-Peñalva (Ph.D.): "Reanalyzing the stative-inchoative alternation in Mazahua."

Third Experimental Portuguese Workshop

With the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, we are co-hosting the Third Experimental Portuguese Linguistics Workshop on April 23 and 24. Unlike the previous one in 2019, the workshop will be online; however, it will still bring together researchers from all over the world. See the website for registration details.

WCCFL 39 and SAIL 2021

The 39th meeting of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, along with this year's Symposium on American Indian Languages, is taking place from April 9 through 11, online, hosted by the University of Arizona.

• Keren Rice (faculty) is giving one of the invited plenary talks: "Can formal linguistics help language reclamation?"
• Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese) is presenting a poster: "When roots become names: An issue of locality."
• Gloria Mellesmoen (MA 2016, now at the University of British Columbia) is presenting a poster: "Reduplicative morphemes and their non-reduplicative allomorphs in Stratal OT: Stem-level and word-level reduplication in Hul’q’umi’num’."
• Michelle Yuan (MA 2013, now at the University of California, San Diego) is part of a talk with Gabriela Caballero (University of California, San Diego) and Claudia Juárez Chávez (University of California, San Diego): "The representation of tone in San Juan Piñas Mixtec: Phonological and orthographic implications."
• Neil Banerjee (BA 2016, now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Indivisible portmanteaux and the timing of ellipsis."
• Spanish and Portuguese MA graduate Filipe H. Kobayashi (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Sherry Yong Chen (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): "Tracking down (c)overt movement with adverbial distributive numerals in Mandarin Chinese."

Research Groups: Friday, April 9

10:00 AM - 11:30 AM: Language Variation and Change Group
Michael Iannozzi (BA 2014, now at the University of Western Ontario) presenting on his work about heritage Italian and contact with English in southern Ontario.

11:30 AM - 1:00 PM: Phonetics/Phonology Research Group
Angelika Kiss (Ph.D.) and Andrei Munteanu (Ph.D.): "Intonation contours in Russian declarative questions."

Intonation is often used to encode speaker commitment to a proposition. While intonation-contours for genuine questions and assertions have been explored previously, phonetic correlates of declarative questions are understudied, particularly for languages other than English. We present preliminary results from an online production experiment, which elicited 4 utterance types – assertions, genuine questions, confirmative declarative questions, and echo declarative questions – from speakers of Russian. A Principal Component Analysis of the F0 contours reveals that the first two principal components are enough to distinguish assertion from other types of sentences, and questions from CDQs and EDQs, but not CDQs from EDQs. The main factor distinguishing CDQs from EDQs appears to be utterance duration. More impressionistically, true questions are signaled through a peak on the verb, while CDQs and EDQs with a peak on the object. Assertions tend to have a peak on the subject, or not at all.

1:00 PM - 2:00 PM: Syntax Group
Samuel Jambrović (Ph.D., Department of Spanish and Portuguese): "Family names and the morphosyntax of specific reference."

Many languages differ from English in requiring a determiner when referring to kinds.

(1) *(Az) elefántok nagyok. (Hungarian)

(2) *(Los) elefantes son grandes. (Spanish)

'Elephants are big.'

In (1) and (2), only context differentiates between specific reference (the elephants are big) and generic reference (elephants are big). With family names, however, these languages contrast specific and generic reference morphosyntactically. To refer to a specific family, Hungarian uses an associative plural marker (3), while Spanish uses a plural determiner (4).

(3) Nagyék a szomszédaim. (Hungarian)
(4) Los García son mis vecinos. (Spanish)
'The Nagys/Garcías are my neighbours.'

The constructions in (3) and (4) are both exceptional. In Hungarian, names do not directly combine with canonical plural morphology, as indicated by the regularization of family names derived from irregular common nouns (ló 'horse' → lovak 'horses', but Ló 'surname' → Lók 'the Lós'). In Spanish, the plural determiner cannot otherwise combine with morphologically singular elements (*los elefante 'the.pl elephant.sg').

These data suggest two generalizations: 1) names are not compatible with NumP, the locus of individuation; 2) there is special plural morphology that only occurs with names. I propose a distinct nominalizer for names to capture these facts and account for the interpretation that names receive at the syntax-semantics interface.