Perspectives on Language Change

A research and networking event for researchers in the language sciences at the University of Cambridge

Programme

13.00-13.30 Registration and coffee

13.30-14.30 Change and stability in the native language of migrants

Professor Monika S. Schmid (Dept. of Language & Linguistics, University of Essex)

Despite increasing evidence from psycho- and neurolinguistic investigations that multilinguals use and process all of their languages differently from monolinguals including the native one, there remains a strong bias in research and theory towards L2 development and L1-to-L2 transfer. The prevalent assumption is (still) that the native language, once completely acquired, is immune to change except in extreme situations of long-term non-use. This presentation will discuss to what extent first language attrition is part and parcel of the overall process of multilingual development, to what extent it is shaped and constrained by external factors (such as age at learning or frequency of use), and whether it is possible to distinguish attriters from non-attriters.

14.30-15.00 Darling, dukeling, duckling: how historical corpora can verify predicted pathways of language change

Dr Marieke Meelen (Theoretical & Applied Linguistics)

Over the years, scholars in formal semantic and morpho-syntactic frameworks have observed a number of ‘universal tendencies’ in language change. Jurafsky’s (1996) study of diminutives, for example, aims to predict the cross-linguistic origin and developments of words and suffixes that are linked to children such as ‘-ling’ in ‘duck-ling’, a baby duck. Recent work in comparative syntax goes one step further attempting to explain how cross-linguistic constraints on word-order variation are manifested and why that might lead to certain changes. These observations, however, are often based on a limited number of examples. In order to trace the exact history of predicted changes and verify postulated mechanisms of change, it is important to dive deeper and more rigorously into a large amount of historical data. In this talk I demonstrate why it is essential to build good historical corpora and how state-of-the-art methods of data mining can not only reveal a wealth of previously unknown linguistic features, they can also check predictions regarding cross-linguistic differences and similarities in semantics, morphology and syntax.

15.00-15.30 Poster slam

One-minute talks by the poster presenters

Poster presenters will give a lightning talk during the plenary session to advertise their poster. Presenters will be given exactly one minute and one slide to let the audience know what their poster is about. 

15.30-16.30 Poster exhibition and refreshments

The poster session will showcase research being carried out within Cambridge Language Sciences with a particular focus on PhD students and postdocs and new and/or interdisciplinary research. It will feature a wide range of disciplinary perspectives relating to Language Sciences and is not restricted to the theme of language change.

16.30-17.00 Language change as a (random?) walk in entropy space

Dr Christian Bentz (Dept. of General Linguistics, University of Tübingen)

This talk explores language change from an information-theoretic perspective. The word entropy of more than 1000 written languages from over 100 families is mapped along two dimensions to measure lexical diversity and runs of the same word combinations. Both turn out to be highly constrained in the sense that languages of the world fall into relatively narrow ranges in both dimensions. However, zooming into these ranges, there is also considerable variation between languages. As languages change over time, they move around in the entropy space. A fundamental question is whether this walk in entropy space is purely random, directed, or a combination of both. In a first step to answer these questions, I explore how ancient languages within the same language family compare to their modern counterparts.

17:00-18:00 The acquisition and evolution of linguistic variation

Professor Kenny Smith (Centre for Language Evolution, University of Edinburgh)

Variation is ubiquitous in natural language: phonetic, morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical variation are all common. However, this variation tends to be predictable. How does this pattern of conditioned variation develop, in individuals and in languages themselves? I’ll present a series of experiments, based around artificial language learning, dyadic interaction and iterated learning paradigms, which allow us to explore how adult and child learners respond to variation in artificial languages, and how their biases in learning and using variable linguistic systems shape how that variation evolves over time. This work shows how interactions between learning, use, and transmission serve to preserve, condition, or eliminate variation in artificial linguistic systems. More generally, this work speaks to constraints on variation within and across natural languages, and the mechanisms which shape the structure of human language.

18.40-19.45 Reception

Drinks reception supported by Cambridge University Press

Posters

Download the full poster programme. We would like to thank Joyce Lim and James Algie for organising the poster slam and exhibition. 

1.     A deep learning approach to automatic characterisation of rhythm in non-native English speech

Konstantinos Kyriakopoulos, Kate Knill, and Mark Gales

2.     A holistic measure of sociolinguistic experience: contextual and individual linguistic diversity in South Africa and the United Kingdom

Mandy Wigdorowitz, Ana Pérez, and Ianthi Tsimpli

3.     Automatic language identification in code-switched Hindi-English social media texts

Sana Kidwai, Christopher Bryant, Li Nguyen, and Theresa Biberauer

*This research was supported by Cambridge Language Sciences Incubator Fund.

4.     An assessment of the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of slum-dwelling mothers pre- and post- ‘SODOTO’ model of intervention in the Kolkata Mobile Teaching Kitchen (MTK) project

Sento Kai Kargbo, Luke Buckner, Minha Rajput-Ray, Maria Korre, and Sumantra Ray

*This research was supported by Cambridge Language Sciences Incubator Fund.

5.     Can you hear what’s coming? An ERP study of phonological prediction

Victoria Poulton and Mante S. Nieuwland

6.     Characterising musical interaction: an exploratory video analysis

Rebecca Whiteman

7.     Designing and developing a virtual English enrichment course for improving Chinese learners’ communicative competence in English

Min Du

8.     Greek accent in pronunciation of Russian coronal fricatives

Daria Dashkevich

9.     How are fact verification systems brittle to linguistic change?

James Thorne and Andreas Vlachos

10.  Learning (a language) at your brain’s pace

Julia Heine, Elizabeth Michael, Zoe Kourtzi, Vicky Leong, Henriette Hendriks & John Williams

*This research was supported by Cambridge Language Sciences Incubator Fund.

11.  Neural computations of prediction error can explain MEG response during recognition of spoken words and pseudowords

Yingcan Wang, Ediz Sohoglu, Rebecca Gilbert, Richard Henson, and Matthew Davis

12.  Neural tracking of attended speech in monolingual and bilingual children

Jacqueline Phelps and Mirjana Bozic

13.  No, you’re not alone: A better way to find people with similar experiences on Reddit

Zhilin Wang, Elena Rastorgeuva, Weizhe Lin, and Xiaodong Wu

14.  Postverbal subjects in Italian monolingual children

Alexander Cairncross and Lena Dal Pozzo

15.  Prosodic correlates of gapping in Mandarin Chinese

Chenyang Zhang

16.  Rapid evolution of the primate larynx

Jacob Dunn

17.  Referentiality and article errors in L2 English: evidence from Brazilian and Russian learners

Kateryna Derkach and Theodora Alexopoulou

18.  Script birth and script death: An interdisciplinary investigation

Philippa Steele, Philip J. Boyes, Robert Crellin, Natalia Elvira Astoreca

19.  The costs of faking it: A pilot study into the evolution of human accents in language

Jonathan R Goodman, Francis Nolan, Chloe Allenby, and Robert Foley

* This research was supported by Cambridge Language Sciences Incubator Fund.

20.  The influence of linguistic and non-linguistic factors on second-language acquisition of tone

Tim Laméris

21.  Time for change: Evaluating models of semantic change without evaluation tasks

Haim Dubossarsky, Simon Hengchen, Nina Tahmasebi, and Dominik Schlechtweg

22.  Towards an automated event-semantic representation of L2 learner inflectional errors

Carlos Balhana

Contact

Registration is now closed. Please email contact@languagesciences.cam.ac.uk for enquiries. 

PHOTO CREDIT: Tree image by Felix Mittermeier from Pixabay