New Tools and Methods for Very-Large-Scale Phonetics Research

The University of Pennsylvania is hosting a workshop (Jan. 28-31, 2011) on new tools and methods for Very-Large-Scale phonetics research, as part of a newly awarded NSF grant. According to their website, "The themes of the workshop include: integration of speech technology in phonetics studies (including 
software to facilitate teaching and research); variation and invariance in large speech corpora; and revisiting classic phonetic and phonological problems from the perspective of corpus phonetics. A tutorial on forced alignment and the Penn Phonetics Lab Forced Aligner will also be provided prior to the workshop. Selected papers from the workshop will be published in a special issue of The Journal of Experimental Linguistics." Participants include IS regulars Elliot Saltzman, Mark Tiede and Louis Goldstein.

Speak geek: the world of made-up language

Caleb Cox, in an article in reghardware.com called "Speak geek: the world of made-up language," discusses invented languages and linguist Arika Okrent's recent book, The Land of Invented Languages. Mentioned in the article are languages such as Elvish, Klingon, John Wilkins' Analytical Language, James Cook Brown's Loglan, Esperanto, and Blissymbolics. GR, a friend of IS, says, "BTW, I have a soft spot for Wilkins; his is the only orthography based purely on semantics. Unfortunately the only fluent writer was Robert Hooke. News of his discovery of the universal joint was delayed for many years because he chose to write the original description in Wilkins' script!" Speaking of obscure languages, GR also suggests Complete Babylonian: A Teach Yourself Guide by Martin Worthington, saying "it is truly excellent and remarkably modern both in appearance and conception -- a must have for your bookshelf."

Embodied Cognition

I just returned from the AAAS 2009 Annual Meeting in Chicago, where I organized and chaired a symposium called "Embodied Cognition: Brains, Mouths, and Hands." There were three great presentations. David Poeppel, New York University, "A Brain's Eye View on Language: Neurobiological Foundations of Comprehension"; Louis Goldstein, University of Southern California and Haskins Laboratories, "An Embodied Theory of Syllabic Organization of Speech"; and Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago, "Using our Bodies to Change Our Minds". See the AAAS News report, "Early Gestures Can Build A Preschooler's Vocabulary" for more information on the work of Meredith Rowe and Susan Goldin-Meadow, which also appears in a report in the February 13 issue of Science.

Kluge

Gary Marcus was the most recent guest at Yale University's Mind, Brain, Culture and Consciouness working group at the Whitney Humanities Center. Gary is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and director of the NYU Center for Child Language. Gary talked about ideas related to linguistics, cognition, evolution, and the brain, that were drawn, in part, from his most recent book, Kluge: the haphazard construction of the human mind. Kluge is a very entertaining and accessible book. Behind its attractive exterior is a fascinating discussion of issues ranging from optimality through intelligent design.

Gary is amazingly prolific -- take a look at some of his earlier books, including: The Algebraic Mind: integrating connectionism and cognitive science and The Birth of the Mind: how a tiny number of genes creates the complexities of human thought. Also, this past Sunday (April 13, 2008 ), Gary had an article in the issue of the New York Times Magazine called "Total Recall" which was about human memory.

Finally, check out Gary's blog entries on The Huffington Post.

The Unfolding of Language

I highly recommend The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, which was supplementary reading for the IS Group meeting held on Nov. 17, 2007. Quoting from the epilogue:

"... complex linguistic structures can arise through the natural forces that are changing language, even today. The elaborate conventions of language needed no gifted inventor to conceive them, no prehistoric assembly of elders to decree their shape, nor even an overseer to guide their construction. ... Behind the forces of change there are always people -- the speakers of a language. ... language change joins a long list of phenomena ... which are brought about through people's actions, but are not willfully intended by them. The transformations in language ... emerge from ... spontaneous and immediate concerns, such as saving effort in pronunciation (economy) or the desire to heighten the effect of an utterance (expressiveness). ... The accumulated pressure of such spontaneous actions nonetheless creates powerful and untiring forces of change: the flow towards abstraction, and erosion in meaning and sounds. The combination of these forces operates on language like a relentless bleaching and compressing machine. ... Language is a tool that has been worn into shape by continual use."

What the F***?

Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has an article called "What the F***? Why we curse" in the Oct. 8, 2007 issue of The New Republic (pp. 24-29). This article is adapted from his new book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which was reviewed on Sep. 23, 2007 by William Saletan in an article called "The Double Thinker" in The New York Times Book Review, and on Sep. 27, 2007 by Colin McGinn in an article called "How You Think" in The New York Review of Books.