Congratulations to Nicole Holliday and Paul E. Reed (University of Alabama) on the publication of their article "Gender and racial bias issues in a commercial 'tone of voice' analysis system" in PLoS ONE!
The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 17, with a talk by Kathryn Davidson (Harvard), taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. Her talk is entitled "Information Structure Insights from Sign Language Anaphora." The abstract is as follows:
Notions of topic and focus have been well-studied in sign languages, which - like many spoken languages - tend to have word orders highly influenced by information structural considerations, along with perhaps some modality-specific considerations provided by suprasegmental "non-manuals" and other simultaneous expression, the tight integration of iconic depiction into the grammatical structure, etc. The use of three-dimensional signing space for tracking referents across a discourse is often considered to be another modality-specific feature, bearing on questions about the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic representation of anaphora in language more generally and how anaphoricity relates to other notions like definiteness, givenness, and contrast. This talk will provide new empirical arguments from sign languages for how the expression of contrast falls out as a consequence of marking (explicit and implicit) discourse familiarity and non-identity and what this means for how we should think about the relationship between anaphoricity, alternatives, and information structure.
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
Congratulations to Tyler Lee-Wynant, who will be giving two talks about his language revitalization work on Northern Pomo at the 9th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation this weekend:
Hannah Sande will present a talk on "Discontinuous harmony and cyclicity in Guébie" in the Linguistics Department at UiT The Arctic University of Norway on Wednesday, March 12, 2025.
Several Berkeley linguists will present at an upcoming workshop on Exploring Boundaries: Phonological domains in the languages of the world in Tromsø, Norway on March 13-14, 2025.
Congratulations to Yevgeniy Melguy (PhD 2022) and Keith Johnson, whose article "What are you sinking about? Experience with unfamiliar accent produces both inhibition and facilitation during lexical processing" was published this week in the Journal of Phonetics.
In and around the Department of Linguistics in the next week:
Gabriella Licata (UC Riverside) will be leading a three-day workshop on "Quantitative Approaches to the Study of Language Attitudes and Bias" from 4-6pm on March 18, 20, and 21 in 5303 Dwinelle Hall. To register (for any or all sessions), kindly email Justin Davidson. Here is a description of the workshop:
In this 3-day intensive workshop, Dr. Licata will present a deep dive into methodologies and analyses for empirical studies of language attitudes and linguistic bias, including the matched guise test (MGT), the implicit association test (IAT), and relevant data analyses in R (exploratory factor analysis, ordinal regression, correlation analyses). Should you not see yourself as a sociolinguist working on attitudes and bias, the skills and software you'll be exposed to in the workshop are nice tools to have at your disposal, if even for the eventual mentoring of future students that would seek your guidance on how to use them!
Calendar:
Day 1 (March 18): Matched Guise and Exploratory Factor Analysis
Day 2 (March 20): Implicit Association Test
Day 3 (March 21): Quantitative Analysis via Ordinal Regression and Correlation Analyses
Gabriella Licata is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Center for Ideas and Society at UC Riverside and Lead Researcher at Mount Tamalpais College inside San Quentin Prison. She takes interdisciplinary approaches and uses mixed methodologies to uncover systemic [linguistic] discrimination as a resource for reform, abolition, and liberation. Gabriella additionally is the founder of a community-based consulting business, Restorative Research Consulting.