Susi Long
Associate Professor, Early Childhood Education/Linguistics Program
University of South Carolina

Engaged in Going Beyond: Learning From the Other Teachers in Children's Lives

In 1995, I completed a 9-month study of one child learning to get along in a new cultural setting (an American child in Iceland). A key finding was that language, literacy, and cultural learning took place to a very limited extent at school where there was little opportunity for risk-free talk. Instead, vocabulary, grammatical structure, and cultural usage were learned through informal interactions with peers at home. Moving back to the U.S., I began to consider findings from that study in terms of children's interactions in multiple language communities and implications for public school classrooms. This interest resulted in a short study (six months) of Mexican American kindergartners and the strategies that they and their peers use to support one another's literacy learning. Drawing from this and other work that considers teaching strategies used in homes and communities, my research now moves to projects that regularly engage preservice and inservice teachers in spending time in homes and community settings beyond their own cultural comfort zones to better understand, appreciate, and learn from the other teachers in children's lives. In this colloquium, I will present an overview of my past work and share data from current work in which educators from a predominantly White, middle class, English-speaking, Christian teaching population confront their own previously unexamined biases as they learn more about knowledge, language, and life in culturally and linguistically diverse settings.

Amit Almor
Associate Professor, Psychology/Linguistics Program
University of South Carolina

The why and how of referential form in discourse

The multiplicity of possible referential forms has been traditionally viewed as a problem that has to be solved during language production and that may call for special strategies during language comprehension. Much existing research has focused on either why certain forms are used in certain contexts (the "why" question), or on how different forms are processed (the "how" question). In my talk I will describe an approach that addresses both questions together and that views the multiplicity of referential form not as a problem but as the solution language offers to a problem created by the constraints of serial communication and the architecture of the memory system that is used for representing discourse. This view shares its emphasis on the balance between cost and function with pragmatic theories such as Relevance Theory and Accessibility Theory that address the "why" question. However, unlike many of these theories, the view I argue for espouses a clear and independently motivated view of computational cost that affects the integrative stage of referential processing. The present view also shares its appeal to memory mechanisms and processing stages with many theories that address the "how" question. However, in contrast to many of these theories, the present view emphasizes the role of semantic representation in working memory and views differences between word classes such as full names and pronouns as driven by these semantic factors and mirroring semantically driven differences between expressions within the same word class (e.g., definite descriptions of varying levels of specificity). More specifically, I argue that the memory system that is used for representing discourse is prone to interference and that the existence of reduced expressions such as pronouns provides an optimized solution for repeated reference with minimal memory interference. In this view, pronouns are the solution language developed to the problem posed by the need to communicate sequentially using limited size informational units that have to be coherently linked, within a memory system that is prone to interferences. I will present the results from several recent behavioral and neuroimaging studies that support this view.

Robert DeKeyser
Department of Second Language Acquisition and Application
University of Maryland

The Holy Grail of implicit language learning

After a brief overview of research in the domain of implicit learning, we will turn our attention to the relative contributions of implicit and explicit processes in the domain of second language learning, depending on age, context, aptitude, and aspect of language to be learned. I will argue that the role of implicit language learning in adults is necessarily very limited, and that this is unfortunate, because explicit learning processes have their limits too. I will emphasize the role that research on the effect of salience could play in further elucidating
these issues, and also discuss tentative implications for more adaptive teaching methodologies.

Colin Phillips
Department of Linguistics
University of Maryland

Time and Constraints

Much work in linguistics has presented detailed descriptions and analyses of grammatical constraints. In this talk I will discuss the question of what it means to know a grammatical constraint, and how this impacts real-time language processes, drawing on behavioral and
electrophysiological (ERP) studies with adults and children on such phenomena as wh-questions and island constraints, anaphora and binding constraints, plus agreement, and polarity licensing, in English, Japanese, Chinese, and Hindi. Many studies indicate that real-time comprehension processes are highly sensitive to grammatical constraints,
and we have taken this as evidence for a grammatical system that operates only in real time, contrary to widely held views in linguistics. However, a number of recent studies suggest that some constraints may be fleetingly violated during language comprehension.
These are constraints that require access to structured memory representations. I argue that these findings can help us to understand a long-standing puzzle in children's mastery of binding constraints.

Jim Collins
The University at Albany, State University of New York

Large-scale migration has numerous consequences for both migrants and host societies. These have sociopolitical, cultural and linguistic dimensions, and can be phrased as the challenge of grappling, theoretically and practically, with volatile linguistic and cultural difference. In exploring the nature and implications of such difference, this paper presents and discusses three cases. The first, and most extensive, reports from a study of Hispanic immigrants in Upstate New York. It focuses on the experiences of immigrant children in schools in the city and suburbs of Albany. The second case involves Belgian schools in the city of Antwerp which serve Turkish, African, and Eastern European children. The last case considers the linguistic situation in Barcelona, in light of a second wave of migration into that region of Spain, focusing upon reception schools serving students from North Africa and Eastern Europe. Concepts of indexicality, participant alignment, and spatial-temporal scale are used to analyze issues of identity, learning, agency, and power as they appear within and across the cases. Drawing on the case-based specifics, I argue that migration-based language pluralism poses particular challenges for thinking about education, because schools are where difficult issues of knowledge and value, of language and belonging, get sharply and repeatedly posed. It also poses challenges for the discipline of linguistic anthropology, since it requires attention to multi-scalar processes: transnational population movements, nation-state institutions, and communicative encounters of an intimate, face-to-face nature.

“Sociolinguistic cognition: (ING) and the evaluation of expertise”

The cognitive basis of linguistic phenomena has attracted increasing interest in subfields throughout linguistics. This interest connects neatly with the concept of "social meaning", a term which has become central in sociolinguistic variation work. This talk reports on a research program aimed at testing the cognitive claim implicit in the social meaning construct, namely that sociolinguistic variables carry social information which is received by listeners and incorporated into their social models of a speaker. The study I present investigated specifically how the English variable (ING) interacts with a single piece of social information to influence evaluations of various aspects of expertise.

The study presented listeners (N = 129) with brief (10-15 second) recordings described as taken from radio talk shows. The "guests" from the show were heard discussing a substantive topic. Listeners were given the speaker's name, job title and a short summary of their point of view on the topic. The recordings themselves had previously been manipulated to create natural-sounding matched pairs, differing only in the tokens of (ING). This linguistic manipulation was crossed with a social variable, in that listeners were told either that the speakers were academics, political candidates or professionals in the field under discussion. The results show that, as in previous work, (ING) substantively impacts social evaluations, but that this effect is seen primarily in shifted relationships between percepts. Additionally, as predicted, (ING) and profession type interact, demonstrating that the role of (ING) changes based on the outside information provided to listeners.

“Sociological consciousness as a correlate of linguistic variation”

The fronting of /o/ as in coat is a robust sociolinguistic variable in the Columbus, Ohio region (Dodsworth 2005, Durian & Dodsworth 2007, Thomas 1989[1993], 2001). In the upper-middle-class Columbus suburb of Worthington, a formerly isolated community that has been engulfed by urban sprawl, /o/ fronting indexes ideological alignment with the urban working class. An acoustic and quantitative analysis of /o/ among 21 Worthington speakers reveals a distribution that cannot be fully explained by familiar sociolinguistic arguments. Building on identity-based sociolinguistic theory that takes as central the link between individual practices and social structures ( e.g., Eckert 2000, Mendoza-Denton 2001), the social-theoretic concept of the sociological imagination (Mills 1959) is proposed as a framework for analyzing the unexplained variation. The sociological imagination is the ability to perceive links among the three coordinate points of biography, social structure, and historical processes. Speakers' differential perceptions of the links among these points, with respect to local ideologies about urban sprawl, are argued to impact their uses of linguistic resources. Specifically, speakers who conceptualize the effects of urban sprawl largely at the level of biography (individual experiences and biases) make the most extreme use of /o/ fronting or non-fronting to construct their local identities. The sociological imagination is thus presented as a theoretical tool useful to the analysis of sociolinguistic variation.

“Sounding like a Prep: Mock Stylization as Social Practice at a Texas High School”

Recent practice-based approaches in sociolinguistics have come to view styles as discursive social action (Coupland 2001) through which speakers project personae and index social types (Eckert 2004). Such a view challenges a notion of styles as sets of co-occurring features that alternate with other sets (Ervin-Tripp 1972) and as sets of variables that occur at different frequencies from other styles (Labov 1972). Specifically exploring the theoretical implications of a conception of language style as social practice, this talk uses methods of discourse analysis to examine data collected during 15 months of ethnographic research at a multiethnic high school located in a Texas military community. In my examination of specific moments of a practice that I refer to as Mock Prep stylization, I show how speakers evoke stereotypical images of speakers (i.e., relatively feminine, wealthy, and white preps) and link these images to particular language features (e.g., rising intonation, high pitch) within the context of locally and widely circulating ideologies of race, class, and gender. I argue not only that stylistic meaning emerges in moments of practice but that style features derive both diachronically and synchronically from their indexical links to types of social practice (e.g., gossiping, whining), which are in turn linked to stereotypical social types. I also demonstrate how this mediated relationship between language features and social personae can explain the sometimes unpredictable and ambiguous nature of which features in fact belong to a style. Additionally, I suggest that because styles derive from their ideological associations with social practices, mock stylization served as an efficient tool for engaging in culturally significant practices, including the construction of identities and socialization into local norms, in a particular high school community.

Masaya Yoshida
Department of Linguistics
Northwestern University

"Problems of representations in sentence processing"

There is great controversy regarding what mental representations the human sentence processor builds and how the parser builds these representations during the online processing of sentences. There is a long-standing tradition suggesting that online parsing is governed by non-linguistic principles such as parsing strategies (e.g., Bever, 1970,
Frazier, 1978) which are totally independent of grammatical constraints. Contrary to this view, this talk argues that detailed grammatical representations and constraints are accessed on-line during sentence comprehension, and that grammatical knowledge strongly influences the way the input is processed.

Through studies on the processing of coreference dependencies and the processing of syntactic islands in Japanese, I will show that (i) the parser constructs hierarchical structure even before encountering high-information-bearing units such as verbs, and (ii) the representations that the parser constructs respect grammatical constraints such as island constraints, which require detailed grammatical information. Consequently, I will argue that the parser builds fully specified grammatical structures incrementally, without delay.