Colloquia and Talks
Conferences and Calls for Papers
Fall Semester Reading Groups

Jeff Holliday presents "Exploring possible non-auditory influences on second language phonological acquisition"

Second language phonology researcher Jeffrey Holliday presents his ongoing research in this lecture. The abstract follows.

In studying how second language (L2) learners acquire a particular L2 perceptual contrast, we typically begin our research with the observation that L2 learners have difficulty accurately perceiving the contrast. We might then take a look at how naïve listeners perceive the contrast, and then compare how novice and advanced L2 learners perceive the contrast. One assumption that underlies this methodology is the existence of some sort of perceptual continuity between naïve listeners and novice learners. That is, the starting point for L2 acquisition is the naïve listener: as L2 instruction begins, anything the naïve listener was already doing "right" should remain the same, and anything the naïve listener was doing "wrong" should eventually be corrected and gravitate towards a native benchmark. In other words, beginning to explicitly learn an L2 should not "mess things up". By looking at data from L1 Mandarin and L1 Japanese learners of L2 Korean, I would like to examine whether L1 Mandarin listeners’ perception of Korean fricatives is constrained by metalinguistic knowledge acquired through learning to read. In this work-in-progress talk, I will give an overview of my dissertation findings, and then kick around my ideas for some experiments planned for this summer. Your feedback is most welcome.

Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning Workshop: Teaching Portfolios: Documenting and Reflecting on Teaching Practice

In this workshop for graduate students, Katie Kearns and Laura Carpenter of the CITL will share strategies for reflecting on teaching through a teaching portfolio and will discuss how to document, organize, and present evidence of teaching effectiveness. Participants will have an opportunity to view sample teaching portfolios during the workshop. To register or find more information, visit the CITL Workshops registration page.

Second Language Studies Colloquium Series

The Department of Second Language Studies presents this colloquium series, which explores a wide range of topics related to second language acquisition.

• January 25: Öner Özçelik presents "Representation and acquisition of word-level prosody."
• Febrary 1: Jeff Holliday (title TBA)

For more information on these or future SLS Colloquia, please visit http://www.iub.edu/~psyling/SLSColloquium/Spring2013.html.

Anne-Michelle Tessier lecture: Development, variation, and transfer in child L2 phonology

Anne-Michelle Tessier (University of Alberta) will present a talk examining L2 phonology among children. The abstract follows:

This talk is about the nature of early child L2 phonology acquisition: specifically focused on children ages 5-7 years old who have less than a year's exposure to their second language. What is the nature of early L2 phonological grammars, including their overall accuracy and error patterns, and their progression towards L2 mastery? How similar is child L2 development to both child L1 and adult L2 learning, and how can we capture these similarities or differences? In this talk, I discuss the early L2 English phonology of 10 children from L1 Chinese and Hindi/Panjabi backgrounds. I illustrate ways in which their phonologies are hybrids of both child L1 English and adult L2 English, and I demonstrate how the 'Dual Route' learner of Becker and Tessier (2011) can simulate development that accords with these child L2 learners. I also will describe current research in progress, which will use early L2 data to tease apart competing explanations-- grammatical, perceptual and lexical-- for error patterns in child speech. .

Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning Workshop: Statements of Philosophy: Critical Reflection about Teaching Practice

In this workshop for graduate students, Katie Kearns and Laura Carpenter of the CITL will share strategies for reflecting on teaching and will discuss the qualities of effective statements of teaching philosophy. Participants will read and analyze several statements and receive reflection guides for getting started. CITL also hosts a Teaching Philosophy Statements Writing Group at various meeting times. To register or find more information, visit the CITL Workshops registration page.

27th Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics

The Department of Linguistics and the Center for the Study of the Middle East will host the 27th meeting of the Arabic Linguistics Symposium from February 28th - March 2, 2013. Invited speakers are Sam Hellmuth (University of York, UK), Elabbas Benmamoun (UIUC), Mona Diab (George Washington University) and Atiqa Hachimi (University of Toronto). All talks will be held in the Georgian Room of the IMU. Click here to see the program and other links.

IULC Working Papers call for submissions

The Indiana University Linguistics Club Working Papers Online is now accepting submissions for Volume 13.
Undergraduate students, graduate students, and faculty members from all departments are encouraged to submit original papers on any subfield in linguistics. Submissions resulting from outstanding term papers and independent research studies are welcome.
The IULCWP is meant to provide a gentle introduction to the world of publishing and a stepping stone to a full-fledged journal submission through the review and revision process. We appreciate faculty support in familiarizing our students with this opportunity and encouraging them to keep it in mind as they begin designing their final projects and papers.
Please visit our website for detailed instructions on submission and to view previous volumes: http://www.indiana.edu/~iulcwp
If you have any questions, don't hesitate to contact us at iulcwp@indiana.edu.

Conferences of Interest

Many conferences of interest to IU Linguists can be found on the Linguist List Calls and Conferences page. Our own page for such announcements is undergoing revisions and will be linked shortly.

CLingDing: Computational Linguistics Hour

CLingDing is a weekly computational linguistics discussion group, where students and faculty share in-progress research. CL students are strongly encouraged to attend.

• January 28 - "Being Social For Computational Linguists!" (collaborative meeting + lunch)
• February 4 - Chung-chieh (Ken) Shan
• February 11 - Wren Thornton: Haskell + parsing scripts (tutorial)
• February 18 - Catapult Center for the Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis

Please see http://cl.indiana.edu/wiki/Spring2013ClingDing for the full spring schedule, or contact Markus Dickinson (md7@indiana.edu) for more information.

PHLEGME: Phonetics Reading Group

PHLEGME is an acronym for PHonetics Literature Enjoyment Group MEeting. As the name implies, this reading group gathers to discuss phonetics papers together in a casual setting. Anyone wanting to participate or find more information can contact Jeffrey Holliday (jjhollid@indiana.edu) to be added to the email list and Oncourse page.

Syntax Reading Group

The Syntax Reading Group is deciding on a meeting time and readings for the semester. For more information or to join the group, contact Yoshihisa Kitagawa (kitagawa@indiana.edu).