Projects

Current research grants

• Title: Second language acquisition at the phonology/syntax interface
  Investigators: Lydia White and Heather Goad
  Duration of grant: 2011-2014
  Granting agency: SSHRC #410-2011-0809
  Project description:
  This research program extends our work on the Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH). The PTH argues for a prosodic account of L2 learners' omission or mispronunciation of inflectional morphology and function words, such as tense, agreement, determiners, etc. In particular, L2 learners are claimed to have difficulties constructing prosodic representations which are disallowed in the L1. In this program, we investigate additional L1/L2 combinations and new morphological domains. A series of experiments will be conducted, investigating the performance of child and adult L2 learners, comparing spoken production of functional material with performance on a variety of other tasks, both online and offline.

• Title:An acoustic-phonetic analysis of conversational speech: the acoustic richness of communicatively-rich versus communicatively-poor words
  Investigator: Meghan Clayards
  Duration of grant: 2011-2014
  Granting agency: FQRSC Nouveau Chercheurs
  Project description:
  This research investigates the acoustic characteristics of conversational style speech. Much is known about the acoustic characteristics of careful laboratory style speech. Conversational style speech is less well studied but understanding it is important for our understanding of normal spoken interaction, building and using human-machine interfaces and extracting information from spoken digital medial. One important difference between careful and conversational speech is that in careful speech all acoustic information is available and in conversational speech some words are highly compressed. The research proposed here investigates how acoustic information is altered in cases of compression. It will use scripted conversations to elicit instances of words in situations where they provide new and important information and in situations where they are informationaly redundant. The amount and type of acoustic information will be compared in these two cases. Experiments will also test whether the amount of acoustic information correlates with ease of recognition in perception.

• Title: Language and Context
  Investigators: Brendan S. Gillon (PI), Alan Bale, Sabine Bergler, Michael Blome-Tillmann, Iwao Hirose, Andrew Reisner.
  Duration of grant: 2010-2013
  Granting agency: SSHRC #410-2010-1254
  Project description:
  How one formulates utterances and how one understands utterances can, and usually does, depend on context, taken in a very, very broad sense. How one understands an utterance depends not only on the words used, their literal meanings, their grammatical properties, the grammar of the utterance (morphology and syntax), how it is pronounced (phonology), but also on the situation in which it is uttered, and even on the beliefs of the utterer and the listeners. Context dependence is central to major issues hotly debated in a variety of areas of contemporary philosophy and to problems pivotal to theoretical and computational linguistics. The overall objective of the project is to bring together philosophy, on the one hand, with theoretical and computational linguistics, on the other, to obtain a rigorous understanding of linguistic context dependence. We shall then use this rigorous understanding to re-examine the philosophical debates and to improve methods in computational linguistics. More specifically, the project has two sub-objectives: to distinguish, in a principled way, between grammatically and non-grammatically based linguistic context dependence and to apply the results to address issues raised in computational linguistics and in philosophy, concentrating in the latter case on issues in decision theory, moral theory and epistemology.

• Title: Degree constructions cross-linguistically: the case of Japanese
  Investigators: Junko Shimoyama (PI) and Bernhard Schwarz.
  Duration of grant: 2010-2013
  Granting agency: SSHRC #410-2010-1264
  Project description:
  This research program aims to contribute to the theory of language variation and universals in the domain of syntax-semantics through a detailed and comprehensive study of so-called degree (or comparison) constructions in Japanese. A central question we address is whether observable differences between corresponding degree constructions in Japanese and English are attributable to independent grammatical variation between the two languages, or such differences are indicative of fundamental differences between the two degree systems. The research will form a basis for further projects on broader cross-linguistic studies.

• Title: Effects de maturation sur l’acquisition et le traitement langagiers (Effects of maturation on the acquisition and processing of language)
  Investigators: Lydia White (PI), Fred Genesee, Heather Goad, Yuriko Oshima-Takane, Karsten Steinhauer, Elin Thordardottir and Michael Wagner.
  Duration of grant: 2009-2013
  Granting agency: FQRSC #2010-SE-130727
  Project description:
  This research program adopts a multi-disciplinary approach, investigating the nature and extent of age effects in language acquisition. The focus is on how age differences affect linguistic representations, language development, processing and use. A number of inter-related projects are included, involving comparisons between monolingual and bilingual language learners of different ages, impaired and unimpaired language learners, early and late acquirers of second languages, and learners experiencing language loss at different ages. Parallel and complementary experiments on a variety of linguistic phenomena are conducted.

• Title: Cues to Segmenting Complex Syllables from the Speech Stream in Infancy
  Investigators: Kris Onishi & Heather Goad.
  Duration of grant: 2009-2011
  Granting agency: CRLMB New Initiative Funds
  Project description:
  This research program experimentally examines the linguistic and statistical cues that infants use to segment the speech stream into syllables. The focus is on the syllabification of word-internal stop+liquid clusters, as these clusters are phonotactically ambiguous when viewed from a cross-linguistic perspective: languages like French syllabify them as tautosyllabic while languages like Arabic syllabify them as heterosyllabic.

• Title: McGill Syntactic Interfaces Research Group (McSIRG)
  Investigators: Lisa Travis (principal), Glyne Piggott, Bernard Schwarz, Junko Shimoyama.
  Duration of grant: 2009-2011
  Granting agency: FQRSC #2010-SE-130906
  Project web page: Click here
  Project description:
  The goal of this cross-modular research group is to closely examine technical issues that arise at the two syntactic interfaces – PF and LF – when syntactic representations are interpreted by either the phonological component or the semantic component. The investigation pays particular attention to the implications to both the phonology and the semantics of expressions of the theory of cyclic Spell Out of phases (Chomsky 2001).

• Title: Interfaces in second language acquisition: accounting for the difficulties of second language learners.
  Principal investigator: Lydia White
  Duration of grant: 2008-2011
  Granting agency: SSHRC #410-2008-1001
  Project description:
  This project investigates possible causes of non-native performance in L2 acquisition. It has recently been suggested that L2 learners have problems in integrating different kinds of grammatical knowledge, for example, syntax with discourse or pragmatic requirements, syntax with morphology, or morphology with phonology. These are areas where different components of the grammar must 'interface' with each other. Projects conducted within the program will address different interfaces, in order to establish which interfaces (and which properties within particular interfaces) are problematic for second language learners and which are not.