# Week of April 10 April 10, 2023 ## Language Universals Workshop Dr. Katie Franich (Harvard University) Title: Probing Tonal Timing Through Speech and Co-Speech Gesture Abstract: Patterns of articulatory timing have been found to have bearing on questions of prosodic typology. Of particular note is the discovery of the c-center effect (Browman & Goldstein 1988, 2000; Nam & Saltzman 2003; Marin & Pouplier 2010; Shaw & Gafos 2015): in many languages, consonant clusters in syllable onsets are characterized by global articulatory timing patterns, such that consonantal articulatory gestures are competitively timed to those of a vocalic nucleus, whereas consonantal gestures associated with the coda will be timed locally, such that only the gestures of the first consonant in a coda cluster will be crucially timed to the vowel. Lexical tone has received much less attention in the context of this work, though a study by Gao (2008) demonstrates that tones in Mandarin Chinese display similar timing behavior to onset consonants, existing in a competitive timing relation with consonantal gestures within the syllable onset. More recent work by Zsiga (2022) has demonstrated that tonal timing works differently in Igbo, a Niger-Congo language, calling into question how widespread the tonal c-center effect may be in African languages. In this paper, I provide acoustic evidence that tones in Medʉmba (Grassfields Bantu), similarly to those in Mandarin, compete with onset consonants in their relative timing to the vowel. Furthermore, I provide evidence that co-speech gestures, where present, perturb tonal timing in a way that partially mirrors the speech-articulatory c-center effect. I discuss implications of these findings for tonal and prosodic typology, arguing that they may also help to explain some aspects of tone-stress interactions. Friday April 14 | 12:00-1:30 PM | Emerson Hall 101 ## Harvard LangCog Dissertation Defense : Anthony Yacovone (Harvard University, Psychology) Title: Grape Expectations: A collection of EEG stories on form-based prediction in natural language contexts” Committee: Jesse Snedeker (chair), Kathryn Davidson, Gina Kuperberg (Tufts/MGH), Roger Levy (MIT) Abstract: It is no longer controversial to say that language comprehension involves prediction. Decades of psycholinguistic research have demonstrated that comprehenders reliably anticipate both the meaning and the form of upcoming words (DeLong et al., 2005; Federmeier & Kutas, 1999; see Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016; Kutas & Federmeier, 2011). The next frontier in predictive processing research is understanding the mechanisms by which prediction arises and how those mechanisms develop in the world’s many languages. To do this, the field must begin to characterize how prediction works in more naturalistic contexts and across a wider range of modalities and populations. In this dissertation, I present three EEG experiments that aim to understand the nature of predictive processing in natural storytelling contexts. In each experiment, we used a novel naturalistic story paradigm in which participants simply comprehend rich, naturally-produced narratives that have experimental manipulations injected into them. As participants comprehended these narratives, we recorded their neural responses to a set of manipulated target words, allowing us to assess the nature of their linguistic predictions. In Experiment 1, we investigated prediction in Spanish-English bilinguals while they listened to short stories in English with occasional Spanish words. We found that bilinguals’ predictions were lexically specific, meaning that they had generated expectations for a particular word in a particular language. This work provided initial evidence that predictions in naturalistic settings are form-based and move beyond just anticipating the gist of upcoming linguistic material (see Yacovone, Moya, & Snedeker, 2021). In Experiment 2, we assessed the nature of form-based predictions by asking whether English-speaking adults predict the sounds of upcoming words during comprehension. In this experiment, we had participants watch a cartoon narration of a children’s book, which had a set of manipulations spliced into it. Specifically, we identified highly predictable and unpredictable words, and then replaced them with non-words that sounded similar or dissimilar to the original word (e.g. cake, ceke, vake). Results indicated smaller neural responses to baseline words (cake) and similar non-words (ceke) relative to dissimilar non-words (vake). However, this reduction in neural responses was only observed for predictable words, demonstrating that participants had predicted the sounds of upcoming words in this naturalistic listening task. In Experiment 3, we further explored the nature of form-based prediction in a different modality—namely, sign language. To do this, we had deaf signers of American Sign Language (ASL) watch a narrative in which we manipulated a set of target signs. Similar to Experiment 2, we identified both predictable and unpredictable signs, and then replaced them with similar and dissimilar non-signs. We found tentative evidence that signers anticipate the handshape of upcoming signs during naturalistic comprehension, mirroring the findings from Experiment 2. Taken together, these studies present a body of work demonstrating the importance of understanding prediction in natural language settings and across different modalities and populations. Tuesday April 11 | 5:30-7:00 PM | William James Hall 105 ## Satik at APA Deniz Satik gave a talk at the [American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting](https://www.apaonline.org/events/EventDetails.aspx?id=1256302) on April 5 titled "The non-trivial problem of personal identity and consciousness". He also received a $300 graduate student travel stipend from the American Philosophical Association for the trip. Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)