How Does Acoustic Variability Affect Vocabulary Learning and Speech Processing?

The music of every day speech: Description and application in language learning

• Dolors Font-Rotches, University of Barcelona
• 7 February

An acoustic method for analysing intonation will be presented and its relevance describing languages and interlanguages in order to be applied in language learning.

I report Corpus Linguistic, Cognitive Linguistic, and Psycholinguistic research showing the effects of language usage upon language acquisition and processing.

Could it be that they really do know what they’re talking about in lectures?

Come and see the breadth and depth of research currently underway in LALS.

Yucatec Maya Sign Languages are indigenous sign languages that spontaneously emerged in Yucatec Maya communities with a high incidence of deafness and without access to any institutionalised sign language. In their interactions, deaf and hearing community members draw from a broad spectrum of semiotic resources: they sign with different degrees of fluency, speak Yucatec Maya and/or Spanish,gesture, draw, point and incorporate objects in their physical surroundings. In addition to a general human “translanguaging instinct”, I will argue that sociolinguistic and cultural features of Yucatec Maya communities facilitate interactions between and beyond different languages and modalities.

• Kevin Parent, Korea Maritime University
• 6 April

In this presentation, we will examine the phenomenon of conversion and its effects on the language learner, focusing on words well-established as both noun and verb such as work, need, change, help, etc. This surprisingly overlooked area raises many questions: is a word with frequent nominal and verbal realisations easier or harder for a learner to acquire? How many such words are there, and how are they distributed? How do learners process words they only know as a noun when they encounter it as a verb?

• Rachael Ruegg, LALS Lecturer
• 13 April

This presentation will give an overview of different aspects of the process of L2 learners providing and receiving feedback on writing.  The information is drawn from 8 different studies of feedback on L2 learners’ writing.  How can learners be encouraged to lead the feedback process?  What effects do peer and teacher feedback have?  What effect do different assessment practices have?

• Bianca Vowell, LALS PhD student
• 20 April

In this presentation, these questions will be answered and the relationship between these two disciplines will be explored. The Speech-Language Therapy training programme options in New Zealand will be outlined and some of the research involving collaborations between practitioners from both fields will be introduced.

Comparing formality of conversations from different social groups

• Robert Sigley, Daito Bunka University
• 4 May

When we collect samples of "casual conversation", what are we actually collecting? Do we get "the same thing" from all social groups? If not, how much does it matter?

• Irene Fioravanti, University for Foreigners of Siena
• 11 May

This presentation focuses on the acquisition of word combinations by second language learners of Italian. Free combinations, collocations and idioms are distinguished in terms of lexical fixedness. Overall, research suggests that idioms and free combinations are less problematic for learners compared to collocations. Might this to be due to their nature? Does the degree of restriction play a role in learners’ vocabulary use? Do learners perceive the three types of word combinations differently? Two studies have been carried out to answer these questions.

• Victoria Chen, LALS Lecturer
• 18 May

Our current understanding of language has been shaped primarily by the investigation of a small number of languages with large numbers of speakers, such as English, French, German, Spanish, and Japanese. In this talk, I discuss why linguistic fieldwork in minority languages is important and how it can inform our understanding of the syntactic rules of human language in general. Using my own experience of working on several endangered Austronesian languages, I will discuss how similarities and differences in the grammars of these closely related languages shed new light on both the synchronic and diachronic aspects of Austronesian syntax.

• Averil Coxhead, LALS Associate Professor
• 25 May

This talk looks at vocabulary in tutorials and laboratories in five ways. It begins with a report on interviews with lecturers and students about speaking in small group academic interactions. Results from an analysis of EAP/ESP textbooks in relation to tutorials and laboratories follows, along with a comparison between phrases suggested in the textbooks and a corpus-based study. The next part looks at a corpus-based analysis of both single and multi-word unit academic word lists for academic purposes. The talk will conclude with a discussion of possible suggestions for pedagogy, textbook writers and future research.

• Diep Tran, LALS PhD Candidate
• 1 June

This study takes a quantitative approach to validating the VSTEP’s listening test in light of both Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory. In-depth item analysis and reliability analysis were carried out to elicit evidence of the test’s validity. This presentation will discuss how the statistics obtained from those analyses can be useful for the revision of the test. It will also demonstrate how Classical Test Theory and Item Response Theory complement each other in validating a language test.

• Miriam Meyerhoff & Richard Arnold, LALS & MSOR Victoria University of Wellington
• 8 June

Two aspects of language variation and change interest us. A speech community is composed of individuals who share the same constraints on linguistic variables – lots of previous work has shown this is a meaningful way to define a speech community. This being the case, variation at the level of the individual becomes another way of defining varieties, and variation between varieties gives rise to differences between languages. Hence, the differences between languages have their roots in individual variation at some point in the past. Or so the thinking goes. No-one has ever shown this. In our talk, we try to engage in this exercise of scaling up. We draw on data from a number of variables differentiating the speech of individual speakers of Bequia Creole English and map these onto variables that differentiate varieties of English, and then onto variables that differentiate languages. We use novel statistical tools to undertake this exercise of scale.

• Maida Bilkic, University of Bern
• 22 June

There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument.

In this talk, I address commemorative atmospheres showing how space is controlled, rejected, appropriated and experienced. Combining the social semiotics and multimodality approaches, I offer a transdisciplinary reading (Halliday, 2001) of a range of semiotic resources and modalities of performance (Van Leeuwen, 2005; Bell & Gibons, 2011). When the denial of violence endures for too long, commemoration manifests itself through performative bodies filling the space with the loudest spectacles – louder than a static monument could ever produce. Such “living memorials” ultimately point to the dynamic entanglement of people and semiotic landscapes, achieved through an affective, monolithic, massive body and its experiences.

• Benjamin Kremmel, University of Innsbruck
• Tuesday 26 June

We could hypothesize that language teachers probably have to know different things about language assessment than people developing tests like IELTS or people deciding on language policies. Or we can check the hypothesis and ask these groups themselves what they think they need to know about language assessment. This talk discusses why Language Assessment Literacy (LAL) is important and should be fostered and presents results from a large-scale study (N=1086) that has aimed to construct a model of LAL based on surveying different stakeholder groups.

This presentation reports on part of an ethnographic study that examines sociolinguistic trajectories of a group of Japanese language teacher volunteers in a government-sponsored international volunteer program in Japan. The study focuses on the 20 participants’ trajectories to the program, by tracing the evolution of their linguistic repertoire in their sociolinguistic trajectories. The study aims to illustrate the evolving and dynamic ways in which one’s mobility and subjectivity are mediated through various metapragmatic discourses regarding language.  Data collected from in-depth life history interviews and participant observation showed that the volunteers’ choices prior to joining the program were mediated by metapragmatic discourses that links English to cosmopolitanism, as well as discourses on native speaker status linked to linguistic ownership and competence.

• Bernard Spolsky, Bar Ilan University
• 5 July

The difficulty in the implementation of state language policy has been explained by its complexity and by the competition of language management at various levels and domains, starting with the individual and the family and including the workplace and religion. In recent studies of language policy in Portuguese and French colonies and successor states, I have learned that this earlier model omits the non-linguistic conditions (like wars, ethnic strife and cleansing, corruption and natural disasters) that lead to changes in language demography and repertoire or that interfere with the formation or implementation of language policies. Further, I have found it appropriate both to modify the analysis of language practices to take into account the fuzziness in definition of named languages and the need to deal with diverse multilingual repertoires. The expanded model permits a better understanding of complexity of language policy and management.

• Loc Nguyen, LALS PhD candidate
• 20 July

Recent studies have found that many teachers’ pronunciation teaching mainly involved error corrections through listen-and-repeat activities but limited research has been done to investigate if corrective feedback is beneficial to pronunciation learning. This study seeks to examine teachers’ and students’ perceptions and attitudes towards corrective feedback in pronunciation teaching and learning in an EFL context where it has not hitherto been researched: Vietnamese tertiary EFL education.

• Robert Sigley, Daito Bunka University, Japan
• 27 July

The results of 93 English entrance exams from Daito Bunka University are analysed to show the effects of changes to the exam-writing process over the past 15 years. The exam sets have been made more consistent in level, and more reliable for their purpose of sorting candidates by English level, despite an increase in required workload, and a decrease in personnel and time available.

• Jonathan Kim, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
• 3 August

The level to which grammatical gender impacts upon gender stereotyped perception was investigated through a two-alternative forced choice design across a fully gendered (French), a semi-gendered (Norwegian), and a non-gendered (Finnish) language. Our results indicated that semi-gendered language speakers are the least susceptible to activating gender stereotypes, whereas fully gendered language speakers are the most susceptible to activating them. Importantly, in French, grammatical gender modulated speakers’ gender stereotypical perceptions.

• Bianca Vowell, LALS PhD Candidate
• 10 August

Third Culture Kids are people who have grown up outside their parents’ home country/ies, often in expatriate communities.

• Haidee Thomson, LALS PhD Candidate
• 17 August

This experimental study investigated the effectiveness of a set of classroom activities to develop knowledge and promote use of multi-word expressions in conversation. University EFL learners in Japan participated in pre and posttest measures including 1) a cloze test of target four word expressions and 2) a spoken role-play which was later analysed for use of target expressions. Preliminary results suggest the use of multi-word expressions in the activities were effective for improving productive knowledge (d=2.22) and use of target multi-word expressions in conversation (r=.45).

• ELI Staff
• 24 August

• Sasha Calhoun, LALS Senior Lecturer
• 21 September

Across languages, there are certain common focus markers. English primarily uses stress: in response to “What did the cow kick?” we would say “the cow kicked the HORSE”; but in response to “What kicked the horse?” we would say “the COW kicked the horse”. Focus is also commonly marked by syntactic constructions such as clefts, e.g. “It was the cow that kicked the horse”. This talk reports studies looking at the perception of prominence and focus in Samoan and English, which differ in the relative importance of stress and syntactic cues to focus.

• Cailing Lu, PhD Celebration
• 28 September

Vocabulary learning is challenging to learners in different ESP contexts, particularly in medical disciplines. To address some of these challenges, my PhD research investigates vocabulary in the discipline of Traditional Chinese Medicine, a field which attracts thousands of Chinese and non-Chinese learners. In this talk, I will briefly outline the development of single and multiword unit discipline-specific word lists based on a comprehensive corpus-based lexical profile analysis. I will also explore learners’ understanding of some technical lexical items to see what items are especially difficult for Chinese and non-Chinese learners. Pedagogical implications will be drawn as to what items to prioritize in valuable classroom time.

• Elaine Vine, Janet Holmes & Paul Nation, Former LALS Academic staff
• 5 October

Elaine Vine

Will discuss the question:  How do professional rugby union referees use language on the field to manage interpersonal relationships with players?

Janet Holmes

Will share evidence of socio-cultural constraints in everyday workplace talk.

Paul Nation

Will discuss what matters in vocabulary learning.

• Jean Parkinson & Averil Coxhead, LALS Academic staff
• 12 October

The Language in Trades Education (LATTE) project is possibly the first time that Applied Linguists, polytechnic academic support staff, physicists, plumbers, carpenters, automotive engineers, and welders collaborated on a language-based project. In this talk, we will briefly outline the LATTE project, present some of our key findings in discourse and vocabulary, and discuss some of the challenges and lessons from this project. We will also suggest some implications and possible avenues for future research.

• Irina Elgort, Center for Academic Development
• 19 October

In two treatment conditions, undergraduate students encountered 90 novel vocabulary items in a reading task with their definitions presented either prior to reading (errorless learning) or after reading (trial-and-error learning). In the control condition, no definitions were presented. In all three conditions, the readers were instructed to infer the meanings of the novel words from context. Three measures were used to evaluate word learning on immediate and delayed post-tests: meaning generation (explicit knowledge), self-paced reading (procedural knowledge) and semantic priming (quality of meaning representations).

• Simon Wehrle, University of Cologne
• 23 November

We add to the limited literature on speech in autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by investigating turn-taking strategies in adults diagnosed with ASD. In comparing these results with a parallel corpus of second language speech, we point out a number of similarities in the communicative styles of both groups. On this basis, we set out to question simplistic conceptions of atypicality by shifting the focus to individual variability. Our approach is exemplified with the demonstration of a novel method for quantifying intonation styles.

• LALS PhD Students, PhD Students' Social Event Organized by FGR & Hosted by LALS
• 7 December