Mayfest 2014: A Big Ten Deal

Dates

May 2-3, 2014

Topic

For this year’s Mayfest, we will be taking a somewhat different approach to years past. This year, the University of Maryland, College Park, officially joined the Committee on Institutional Collaboration (CIC) as a part of its broader integration with the Big Ten. Nearly every member institution offers a department or program in linguistics, representing a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, and CIC schools’ programs in speech-language pathology and other communicative disorders are among the best in the nation.

We would like to draw on this wealth of experience and knowledge for Mayfest 2014, which we hope will provide a springboard for collaboration between language scientists across the CIC institutions. We have invited a speaker from each CIC institution to speak about a broad theme in language science: to what extent can theoretical research inform experimental practice, and vice versa? In particular, we have invited speakers from two major focuses of CIC language science research: prosody and language acquisition.

This event is funded in part by your Graduate Student Activities Fee and is therefore open to the entire Graduate Student Community.

Registration and Contact Info

A registration form is now available here. Contact mayfest.umd@gmail.com with any questions.

Location

May 2nd: 1400 Marie Mount Hall
May 3rd: the Maryland Room, Marie Mount Hall

Speakers

Diane Brentari (Linguistics, University of Chicago)
Tom Carrell (Special Education and Communication Disorders, University of Nebraska)
Laura Dilley (Communicative Sciences and Disorders, Michigan State University)
Jan Edwards (Communication Sciences and Disorders, University of Wisconsin, Madison)
Thomas Farmer (Psychology, University of Iowa)
Tim Hunter (Linguistics, University of Minnesota)
Yoshihisa Kitagawa (Linguistics, Indiana University)
Judith Kroll (Psychology, Penn State University)
Casey Lew-Williams (Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University)
Acrisio Pires (Linguistics, University of Michigan)
Amanda Seidl (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, Purdue University)
Kristen Syrett (Linguistics, Rutgers University)
Laura Wagner (Psychology, The Ohio State University)
Duane Watson (Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign)

Schedule

9:00-9:30   Breakfast (provided)
9:30-10:15   Judith Kroll (Penn State) - How the Mind and the Brain Negotiate Competition for Selection in Bilingual Speech
10:15-11:00   Acrisio Pires (Michigan) - The (In)Completeness Paradox: Bilingual Acquisition and Ultimate Attainment
11:00-11:15   Coffee Break
11:15-12:00   Yoshihisa Kitagawa (Indiana) - Avoiding Look-ahead and Look-across
12:00-12:45   Duane Watson (UIUC) - Prosody, Production, and Prominence
12:45-2:00   Lunch (provided)
2:00-2:45   Diane Brentari (Chicago) - Variance and Invariance in Sign Language Prosody
2:45-3:30   Casey Lew-Williams (Northwestern) - Learn Like a Baby: The Power of Language Input on Statistical Learning
3:30-3:45   Coffee Break
3:45-4:30   Amanda Seidl (Purdue) - To Pat the Bunny or the Baby: Cross-modal Cue Use by Caregivers and Infants
4:30-5:15   Jan Edwards (Wisconsin) - Phonological Development: The Acquisition of a (Really) Complex System
5:15-5:45   Discussion
5:45-6:30   Big Ten Reception and Refreshments
7:00-late   Party with Dinner

9:30-10:00   Breakfast (provided)
10:00-10:45   Kristen Syrett (Rutgers) - Challenges in the Interpretation of Quantities and Comparison in Language Acquisition
10:45-11:30   Laura Wagner (The Ohio State) - Children's Understanding of Regional Dialect Variation
11:30-12:15   Tim Hunter (Minnesota) - Probabilistic Learning as a Probe of Primitive Grammatical Mechanisms
12:15-1:45   Lunch (provided)
1:45-2:30   Laura Dilley (Michigan State) - Great expectations: How speech rate- and rhythm-based prediction affects language processing
2:30-3:15   Tom Carrell (Nebraska) - The prosodic foundation of speech: How pitch and timing create auditory objects
3:15-3:30   coffee break
3:30-4:15   Thomas Farmer (Iowa) - Second Language Acquisition as a Window onto the Development of Linguistic Expectations
4:15-5:00   final discussion