Nominations 1 - 5 - References only

If you want a quick list, and don’t want to sort through the posts, here are our current WITS that are up for paper of the year:

Beddor, P. S.; McGowan, K. B.; Boland, J. E.; Coetzee, A. W., & Brasher, A. (2013). The time course of perception of coarticulation. JASA, 133, 2350 – 2366.

Goslin, J.; Duffy, H.; and Floccia, C. 2012. An ERP investigation of regional and freign accent processing. Brain and Language, 122, 92 – 102.

Grossberg, S. 2013. Adaptive Resonance Theory: How a brain learns to consciously attend, learn, and recognize a changing world.  Neural Networks, 37, 1 – 47.

Szakay, A., Babel, M., & King, J. (2012). Sociophonetic markers facilitate translation priming: Maori English GOAT – a different kind of animal. In H. Prichard (ed.), UPenn Working Papers in Linguistics, 18: Selected Papers from NWAV 40, pp. 137 – 146.

Weber, A., & Scharenborg, O. (2012). Models of spoken-word recognition. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3, 387–401. doi:10.1002/wcs.1178

Remember to nominate your papers, and upload the PDFs to our Mendeley library!!!

Nomination #1

Grossberg, S. 2013. Adaptive Resonance Theory: How a brain learns to consciously attend, learn, and recognize a changing world.  Neural Networks, 37, 1 – 47.

Why it is inspiring: As daunting as it is, it does not oversimplify the highly complex process of spoken word recognition (which itself is only a part of the paper). And, it was a fun read … just as the reader believes it is a theory of everything, Grossberg assures us – it isn’t.

Something to think about: We read this in a graduate seminar in the fall with sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, phonology, and phonetics students.  We all were excited and invigorated to have this overview; as it addressed issues we felt were often left unconsidered in other work.  At the same time, the question of how we can make this more accessible in our own work and in the community was raised over and over again; it is dense and it is not a paper that is likely to be standard reading for linguists.  We decided more talking and reading were the answers, and this paper was the impetus of our Favorite Paper of the Year Contest.  We may not understand the mechanics behind everything yet, but we are talking about it! 

Nomination #5

Beddor, P. S.; McGowan, K. B.; Boland, J. E.; Coetzee, A. W., & Brasher, A. (2013). The time course of perception of coarticulation. JASA, 133, 2350 – 2366.

Why it is inspiring: The authors argue that a listener’s behavior is not simply the deterministic result of that listener’s linguistic experience.

Something to think about: If listeners attend differently to different cues to linguistic units in speech, it seems all too likely that the same is true for indexical and socio-indexical cues, as well!

Nomination #4

Szakay, A., Babel, M., & King, J. (2012). Sociophonetic markers facilitate translation priming: Maori English GOAT – a different kind of animal. In H. Prichard (ed.), UPenn Working Papers in Linguistics, 18: Selected Papers from NWAV 40, pp. 137 – 146.

Why it is inspiring: The authors extend the work of Sumner & Samuel (2009) and find that the presence of a phonetic variant that indexes the speaker as a member of a particular ethnic/dialect group can serve as a prime in a cross-language lexical decision task.  This result is consistent with other work showing that socioindexical expectations enhance perception. 

Something to think about: It is also possible that the observed effect is due to an inhibitory mismatch between Maori and Pakeha English.

Nomination #3

Weber, A., & Scharenborg, O. (2012). Models of spoken-word recognition. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 3, 387–401. doi:10.1002/wcs.1178

Why it is inspiring: We like review articles, generally.  But this one is particularly thorough and accessible.

Nomination #2

Goslin, J.; Duffy, H.; and Floccia, C. 2012. An ERP investigation of regional and freign accent processing. Brain and Language, 122, 92 – 102.

Why it is inspiring: The authors attempt to synthesize two lines of research in which we are interested; drawing distinctions between the processing of foreign-accented and regional-accented speech at the lexical and sub-lexical levels of processing.  The link to other work is transparent and accessible.

Something to think about: Are dialects of British English processed as a foreign accent or as a regional accent by American English listeners?  Hmm.

About WITS

My students and I are constantly inspired by the work of others, and decided to celebrate this inspiration annually.  Our hope is that this will encourage us to engage with recent literature, but also share with each other papers we might not have come across on our own.  This year, we instituted a contest to encourage the timely reading and discussion of inspiring papers.  For those interested, here are the rules we hashed out:

1. We may each nominate two papers published from June 1, 2012 – August 31, 2013. Group members (currently, 4 of us) must nominate at least 1 paper (max = 2), we encourage nominations by others.

2.  Each nomination must touch on two of the following broad areas (but need not be framed as such in the paper): phonetic variation, spoken word recognition, speech perception, memory, attention, or related areas in social-network theory or social psychology.

3. To nominate a paper, you must: (1) send the citation, (2) a “Why it is inspiring” statement (no longer than 4 sentences), and (3) a "something to think about" statement (no longer than 4 sentences) to MEGHAN.  Feel free to replace nominations if you come across something that inspires you even more than your originally nominated paper.

4. Final nominations are accepted on August 31, 2013.

5. We all read all the nominated papers, and vote for our favorite via Doodle Poll on September 21, 2013.

6. We have a dinner to celebrate our favorite paper of the year!!!  This year’s date: Tuesday, October 1, 2013; 6:00pm, Evvia.

7.  Start over for next year!