[CaCL] (Final!) Room change and topic for next week

[Fred Mailhot]

Hi everyone,

1) We have a new, finalized room. For the remainder of this quarter we 
will be meeting in Hagerty 406 (thanks to Andrea Sims and Slavic 
Linguistics!).

2) For next week (2010-01-24), we will be reading a recent paper by 
Alice Turk (get it at 
http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~fmailhot/CaCL/Turk2010.pdf). Either Beth 
or I will lead/facilitate the discussion.

Turk, A. (2010) "Does prosodic constituency signal relative 
predictability? A Smooth Signal Redundancy hypothesis." Proceedings of 
LabPhon 10.

Abstract:
This paper explores issues relating to signaling word boundaries from 
the perspective of Aylett’s Smooth Signal Redundancy proposal (Aylett 
2000, Aylett and Turk 2004) that language has evolved to spread 
redundancy, i.e. recognition likelihood, evenly throughout utterances. 
In Aylett’s proposal, information that enables listeners to identify 
sequences of elements in an utterance (signal redundancy) comes from two 
sources: a) language redundancy, recognition likelihood based on 
lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and other factors, and b) 
acoustic redundancy, recognition likelihood based on acoustic salience. 
Smooth signal redundancy is achieved by a complementary relationship 
between language redundancy and acoustic redundancy that is implemented 
via prosodic structure.
While Aylett and Turk (2004) present the case for prosodic prominence as 
a leverfor modulating the acoustic salience of syllables, the current 
paper proposes that prosodic constituency also fulfils this function for 
words. The current paper proposes that the signal redundancy, or 
recognition likelihood, of words can be manipulated by signaling their 
boundaries, and that the occurrence and strength of these boundary 
markers correlates inversely with language redundancy. Prosodic 
constituency implements the complementary relationship between language 
redundancy and word boundary salience.
Smooth Signal Redundancy provides an integrated explanation for a set of 
properties
relating to prosodic constituent structure.


Cheers,
Fred.