Language Dynamics Group News.

Charlotte Vaughn and Janet Pierrehumbert have had a paper entitled "Using character n-grams to classify native language in a non-native English corpus of transcribed speech" accepted for the American Association for Corpus Linguistics meeting, Oct 8-11, 2009.

Ken Konopka presented his poster, "Vowel duration in Mexican Heritage English" at the Acoustical Society Meeting, May 18-22, Portland.

Robert Daland has defended and filed his thesis, Word segmentation, word recognition, and word learning: A computational model of first language aquisition. 5/8/09.

Janet Pierrehumbert and Robert Daland present their work at the Illinois Speech Day, Toyota Technological Institute, May 5.

Jordana Heller has been awarded a Cognitive Science Fellowship for 2009-10 for her project entitled "Timing of Discourse-Thematic and Non-Thematic Words in Speech and Reading," co-advised by Janet Pierrehumbert and David Rapp (Learning Sciences/Psychology).

Janet Pierrehumbert presented a keynote address on "Learning Mechanisms and Dialectal Differentiation" at the Production, Perception, and Attitute symposium in Leuven, April 2-3.

Janet Pierrehumbert participated in a workshop on Model and Mechanisms of Language Variation and Change at the Santa Fe Institute.

Our Speech and the Cell Phone documentary film was launched at an event at the Evanston Public Library, March 14.

Robert Daland has been accepted a position as an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at UCLA. (2/13/09).

A figure from Eduardo Altmann's paper "Emission from dielectric cavities in terms of invariant sets of the chaotic ray dynamics", Phys. Rev. A 79, 013830 (2009) or [arXiv:0805.2190]. has been selected for Phys. Rev. A Kaleidoscope: http://pra.aps.org/node/2407

Two papers have been accepted for presentation at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the LSA: [1] Robert Daland: Diphone-based word segmentation in Russian and English and [2] Xiaoju Zheng and Janet Pierrehumbert: The effects of metrical prominence and position on duration perception.

James German defended his Ph.D dissertation on September 12, and will take up a postdoctoral position in Aix-en-Provence.

Ken Konopka has been awarded a Graduate Research Grant to support his project on Mexican-American Heritage English.

Robert Daland has been awarded a Dissertation Year Fellowship for AY 2008-09.

LabPhon 11, co-organized by lab alum Jen Hay in Wellington, New Zealand, included papers by Mary Ann Walter "Vowel Cooccurrence in the Lexicon: An Anti-OCP Effect?" and by Janet Pierrehumbert (with Cynthia Clopper and Terrin Tamati), "Lexical Bias in Cross-Dialect Word Recognition in Noise."

Becky Raffensperger has received a 2008 CogSci Summer Fellowship to work on "Modelling economically driven linguistic convergence" with Janet Pierrehumbert and Sid Horton.

Tyler Perrachione (BA/MA 2007) has been awarded an NSF Graduate Fellowship. Tyler is now a Ph.D student in Brain and Behavioral Sciences at MIT.

Alex Djalali has graduated Phi Beta Kappa and with honors in Linguistics in the class of 2008. He has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to work in the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation in Amsterdam.

Ken Konopka presented the paper "Vowels in contact: Mexican Heritage English in Chicago" (joint work with Janet Pierrehumbert) at the Symposium about Language and Society at Austin (SALSA) in April, 2008.

Stefan Frisch, Ph.D 1996, has been appointed Editor in Chief of the Journal of Phonetics, effective January 2008. He has also been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure at the Univ. of South Florida.

In cooperation with Tiz Media Foundation and the Motorola Center for Seamless Communications, Janet Pierrehumbert has been awarded an Innovation Generation Grant from the Motorola Foundation, 11/15/07 Announcement.

Pierrehumbert, Katsaggelos, Horton, and Wu have been awarded funding from the Motorola Corporation for a project entitled: "Audio-visual databases and architectures for improving recognition of reduced wordforms", 6/1/07.

The following papers were accepted for presentation at the 2008 Annual Meeting of the LSA in Chicago, IL: [1] Alex Djalali, Janet Pierrehumbert, and Brady Clark. The effect of focus on bridging inferences. [2] James German and Janet Pierrehumbert. Conditions for accenting pronouns: Contrastivity versus attentional shift.

James German has accepted a post-doctoral position at Univ. of Aix-en-Provence, starting 9/1/08.

James German has been awarded a Northwestern University Dissertation Year Fellowship for AY 2007/08.

Robert Daland, Andrea Sims, and Janet Pierrehumbert have a paper accepted for the June 2007 ACL meeting in Prague.

Andrea Sims has accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Slavic at Ohio State University, effective 9/2008.

Language and Music Systems partner Mirjam Ernestus wins EURYI Award

Language and Music Systems featured in the Spring 2006 issue of the
WCAS CrossCurrents Magazine.

Sarmad Hussain heads PanAsia internet access project in Pakistan.

Papers in Laboratory Phonology V (proceedings of Labphon5, Northwestern 7/96) reissued by Cambridge University Press.

ONZE group (et al. Jen Hay et al.) publishes New Zealand English: Its Origins and Evolution.

Pierrehumbert amongst the Ten elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences
(Northwestern Observer May 13, 2004)

Routledge publishes Jen Hay's thesis Causes and Consequences of Word Structure.

James S. McDonnell 2002 Research Award in Studying Complex Systems to Janet Pierrehumbert, "Dynamics and metastability in phonological grammar"