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« Kingston and Co. Talk in Psychology | Main | Acquisition/Evidentials Lab Meeting»

Kimper and Elfner Talk at Hampshire

Wendell Kimper and Emily Elfner are giving a talk in the Hampshire College Cognitive Science lunch series, February 18, 12:15 pm, in the ASH building lobby. The title is 'What can Ned Flanders tell us about linguistic knowledge? Diddly-infixation and the poverty of the stimulus'. Abstract below.

Abstract

What does it mean to know a language? Linguistic grammars are complex systems of rules and constraints that speakers use to create infinite numbers of novel sentences and interpret unfamiliar strings of sounds and words. As children, we acquire our language with no formal instruction, yet we inevitably grow up to be competent speakers with strong intuitions about which utterances belong in our language, and which do not. In this talk, we report on the results of an questionnaire experiment testing speaker intuitions about a novel language-game (diddly-infixation) originating from a speech habit of Ned Flanders, a fictional character the television show The Simpsons. On the show, Ned inserts the nonsense word diddly into regular words of English; for example, WELcome becomes WEL-diddly-ELcome. Diddly is inserted most naturally into words where stress falls on the initial syllable (e.g., WELcome), and part of that syllable is repeated (WEL-diddly-ELcome). Following a hypothesis that the position of diddly and the use of repetition depends on the location of word-stress in the word, we asked our subjects to generalize the process to novel words with initial stress (e.g., CANada), as well as novel words where stress falls on a non-initial syllable (e.g. fanTAStic). We found that speakers agreed not only on how to use diddly in novel words following the initial stress pattern (insertion plus repetition of the syllable, CAN-diddly-ANada), but also agreed on when to deviate from this pattern: in words where a non-initial syllable is stressed (e.g. fanTAStic), our subjects preferred forms with insertion but no repetition (fan-diddly-TAStic) over forms with both insertion and repetition (fanTAS-diddly-AStic). We present an analysis of these results which shows that speakers use general linguistic constraints present in their grammar to make decisions about novel linguistic tasks.

February 12, 2009 12:04 AM | 07:04 (2009-02-12) , events , grad-student news , publications/presentations