Welcome to our program-participant blog! Posts are only accessible by program participants and affiliates. Guidelines and requirements can be found here.
Bloggers, don’t forget to follow your post schedule (on our calendar, here). Finally, don’t forget to password-protect your posts!
Happy blogging!
Love phonology? Come attend these free workshops at Princeton!
https://linguistics.princeton.edu/pphf/
On behalf of the Concordia and McGill Linguistics student association, we would like to invite your students to our 3rd annual Canadian Linguistics Annual Undergraduate Symposium (CLAUSE) that will be taking place on Saturday, March 16, 2019, at Concordia University in Montreal, Québec.The Concordia Linguistics Student Association (LSA), in conjunction with The Society of Linguistics Undergraduates of McGill (SLUM), are happy to present the third Canadian Linguistics Annual Undergraduate Symposium (CLAUSE̥) to be hosted at Concordia University. The mandate of CLAUSE̥ is to provide a venue for linguistic undergraduates to showcase their original research, and to foster academic dialogue and networks between undergraduates from different schools. Finally, CLAUSE̥ aims to encourage undergraduate linguists to pursue original research while building a research and presentation portfolio. CLAUSE̥ is open to the presentation of any topic pertinent to the study of linguistics.Submit your best original research before February 22nd! All we need is a short abstract (suggested 500 words). Tell us what you’re working on currently, or a recent project you’re proud of.
You can submit your work at: https://linguistlist.org/easyabs/clause2019
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for CLAUSE̥, please reach out toclausesubmissions2019@gmail.com.
You may also find us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/clausemtl/
Ekaterini Tsoraidis
VP ExternalConcordia Linguistics Student Association1455 Boulevard de Maisonneuve West
Fourth floor, room 400.01Montréal, QC H3G 1M8
Since my last post, we have recruited four participants for the study. We had collected data from about three pilots before hand and had a good enough corpus of data to submit an abstract for a conference!
Here is our abstract:
“The purpose of this study is to examine speech processing in the auditory context of competing background noise to elucidate how bilingual experience modulates speech discrimination of English contrasts that are not phonemic in Spanish. We measured the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) component of event related potentials (ERPs). MMN reflects discrimination of auditory or speech contrasts (Näätänen, et al., 2007). We hypothesized that bilinguals would be less automatic in neural discrimination of speech contrasts because English, but not Spanish distinguishes the target vowels /ɑ/ and /æ/ . Thus, attention to and away from the speech is expected to more strongly modulate discrimination for bilinguals. ERPs to speech stimuli were recorded from 64 scalp sites in two conditions. In condition 1, participants’ attention was directed away (by watching a muted video) from the speech, which consisted of a female voice uttering /ɑpə/ as standard and /æpə/ as deviant mixed with a male voice uttering /epə/ as standard and /apə/ as deviant. In condition 2, participants were required to focus on the female voice /æpə/ by counting the deviants and to ignore the male voice. Preliminary results with four bilinguals revealed that attention enhanced the MMN amplitude to the target /æ/, but not to the non-target /e/ for the male voice in bilingual participants. In contrast, monolingual participants showed little or no increase in MMN to the target vowel, increased amplitude of a late negativity to the target, but also positivity to the non-target male voice /e/. These findings suggest that bilingual experience influences processing of both target and non-target speech information. The pattern may be explained in terms of differences in how bilinguals and monolinguals inhibit interfering speech. Future directions will relate these findings to behavioral indices of target perception and to age and proficiency of second language acquisition.”
I am currently working on recruiting more participants and adding a new condition that has two female voices as the stimulus. In theory, It will be more difficult to differentiate the target stimulus from the non-target stimulus if they are both coming from female voices. I am planning on submitting a new abstract later this month for the Cornell Linguistics Colloquium with data from the new paradigm. I would encourage anyone reading this to prepare an abstract for this colloquium even if you haven’t collected much data just so you can practice writing an abstract for a presentation and hopefully present at this event! I went last year and it was such an intimate event, the UnderLings (Cornell’s undergraduate linguistics club) approached everyone and tried to get to know them.
|
||||||||
|
