Asymmetries in phonological representation and processing
Adhiti Lahiri (Oxford University)
The speaker-listener interaction is problematic since pronunciation of words is inevitably variable. No word is ever uttered in an identical fashion even by the same speaker. Models of word recognition vary in their assumptions about how words are represented in the mental lexicon, how much detail is stored, and how the speech signal is mapped on to the lexicon. The Featurally Underspecified Lexicon (FUL) claims that some variability problems can be resolved by assuming that the representation of words is phonologically sparse. Privative underspecified feature representations, which account for a number of asymmetries that are typical and pertinacious in synchronic and diachronic phonological systems, are also responsible for asymmetries in word recognition. These features, extracted from the signal, are then mapped on to the lexical representation using a three-way matching logic of “match, mismatch, no-mismatch“. The talk will present a phonological sketch of the model along with evidence from a series of psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic experiments on German, English, Swedish and Bengali.
The Centre for Literacy & Multilingualism (CeLM) at the University of Reading and Bilingualism Matters @ Reading are delivering two interactive events in collaboration with the award winning charity ‘Mothertongue’ to communicate the benefits of maintaining the Mother Tongue and provide a glimpse into the work of interpreters.
The benefits for bilingual children in maintaining their mother tongue
Tuesday 21 February, 7pm
Bulmershe Theatre, Minghella Building, Whiteknights campus
Mothertongue- In other words: Interpreters’ stories
Tuesday 21 February, 8pm
Bulmershe Theatre, Minghella Building, Whiteknights campus
CeLM Seminar Series
What it’s like to be an academic these days, as revealed by changing writing practices
by David Barton (Lancaster University)
Date Wed 22nd February 2017
Time 15h00 – 16h30
Venue CHANCELLORS-100
Academics seem to be getting busier: they are having more demands placed upon them; they are carrying out a wider variety of writing tasks; and boundaries between work and not-work are collapsing. This paper explores the extent to which this is happening and the role of the digital world in such changes, drawing upon a recent ESRC study The Dynamics of Knowledge Creation: Academics’ Writing Practices in the Contemporary University Workplace. Working across 3 disciplines in 3 universities in England, the study documents the diversity of writing practices including writing for research, for teaching, for administration and for impact. It draws on a range of methods including techno-biographical interviews, observations and tracking of specific events, discussions around pieces of writing and auto-ethnographic investigations of the research team’s own practices.
As a way of understanding how academics experience and respond to change this paper will concentrate on the role of new technologies and examine Affect – the strong the strong feelings which academics express about their digital lives. For example they loved or hated Twitter, Skype, PowerPoint and, above all, email. Focusing on affect was a good way to engage people and it proved very revealing about changes in practices. Such examples of affect enabled us to see other issues and to explore a central question of how digital communications technologies are shaping academics writing practices. Each person seemed to have a personal profile of what devices and platforms they utilized. Through analyzing these, we see individual routes to common ends in their work lives along with stresses and tensions in contemporary academic life.
