CFP: NWAV Asia-Pacific @ Tokyo, Japan

NWAV ASIA-PACIFIC 2 (the 2nd annual meeting of New Ways of Analyzing Variation and Change in the Asia-Pacific Region) will be held on August 1st-4th, 2012, in Tokyo, Japan. NWAV-AP2 will be hosted by the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL).

While the Western study of sociolinguistic variation and change emerged in the mid 1960s, highly quantitative work on variation and change has existed in Japan since 1930. The methodological and analytical approach used in the early research of Japanese dialectology had its roots in the particular socio-historical context of the region and established its own unique foundations. Meeting in Tokyo in 2012 allows NWAV ASIA-PACIFIC to highlight and re-acknowledge the long and rich history of research on language variation and change in this region, which has often been overlooked in the field of sociolinguistics. The conference will also continue the tradition established at NWAV-AP1 of showcasing the innovative, descriptive, philological, historical, and socially informed research being conducted by emerging and established scholars in some of the world's most fertile arenas of language and dialect contact.

The first meeting of NWAV ASIA-PACIFIC was held at the University of Delhi, India in February 2011. The conference involved many international scholars and valuable cross-cultural exchanges of research ideas and experiences. For further information about the first meeting of the conference series, please see the following site: http://nwavap.du.ac.in/.

CFP: Regional Varieties, Language Shift and Linguistics Identities @ Aston University

Aston University, 12.-14. September 2012

Plenary Speakers:
Prof. Joan Beal, University of Sheffield (UK)
Prof. Barbara Johnstone, Carnegie Mellon University (USA)
Prof. Yaron Matras, University of Manchester (UK)

Regional varieties have become an important contributor to identity construction processes, and an increasingly important issue for the individual and the community in late Modernity: the individual is under constant and increasing pressure to define who s/he is and has to choose from an ever growing pool of possibilities to construct social identity in an increasingly globalized world, which is perceived as incromprehensively complex. By referring to what is seen as traditional regional language, dialect and culture, localizing oneself seems to be a viable way out of this dilemma. This should have stabilizing effects on lesser used varieties, which have been facing a gradual process of language shift and divergence towards dominant contact languages over the hundred years. Unfortunately, at the same time, modern life does not so much require knowledge of regional varieties as of standard languages and a good command of English as the global lingua franca. How can an upwardly mobile individual combine the requirements of modern life with identity construction on a regional scale if they so choose? What are the linguistic consequences for lesser used varieties and their respective contact languages?

Workshop: BCI and EEG-fMRI @ Germany

Workshop on 24th of May in Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK) Delmenhorst, Germany
Organizers: Maarten De Vos and Stefan Debener.

We are glad to announce a workshop focusing on single trials in EEG and fMRI. During the workshop, talks and talking posters will be held discussing state-of-the-art methods related to the reliable estimation of single trials and its relevance for EEG-fMRI integration. We envision insights from innovative single trial estimation, namely BCI.

Host institution and conference venue is Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (http://www.h-w-k.de/1786.html?&L=2&id=1786). Application forms can be downloaded on this website. Interested participants are welcome to send the application to eeg-fmri@uni-oldenburg.de. Due to the limited number of places, priority will be given to people working in the field. Participation fee is 28 euro. Participants have the opportunity to present own research as a poster if interested (please indicate the poster title with your application). Deadline of application: 15th of april.

Experiment: Neural network modeling of semantic and associative networks

Awhile back, I posted a neural network application I developed that uses back propagation to support machine learning -- basically a bare bones network capable of learning to map any given input pattern to a specific output pattern. One of the things that interests me about neural network modelling, is that they provide a neurologically plausible means of modelling cognitive processes such as language production. For example, a few years back, I developed a different neural network to simulate the types of errors commonly observed in aphasics or patients undergoing cortical stimulation mapping (CSM) - a procedure designed to identify "eloquent" language cortex so that these critical regions can be preserved during neurosurgery for epilepsy or tumor resection. During CSM, an awake patient is given a confrontation naming task (i.e. shown pictures of common objects and asked to name them), and during certain trials, the neurosurgeon will apply current directly to the cortex. Sometimes, if the stimulation will result in a naming error such as a semantic paraphasia (CAT-> "dog") or phonological error (DOG -> "log"). 


The application attempted to simulate these error types in order test one plausible model of underlying semantic/conceptual organization. Specifically, I defined concept nodes (e.g. DOG) that mapped to a layer of feature nodes (e.g., furry, four-legged, has tail, etc.) that were based on a set of feature norms developed by McRae and colleagues. The feature layer of nodes was then linked to an output layer of phonological form, in order to model the process of seeing an object, activating its semantic/conceptual features, and then producing the object's name. Because objects can share common features (e.g., DOG & CAT share "furry"), this introduces the possibility for naming to go awry if the activation state of a particular node breaches its threshold level. In order to induce these types of errors, I would then "lesion" the model (analogous to an aphasic lesion or the temporary lesions in CSM) by introducing some amount of noise in the model. The basic findings were that this model of semantic/conceptual organization did quite well in capturing the sorts of errors as observed in real CSM data. I'll have to dig through some of my old hard drives, but hopefully I can post the source code and application up here at some point.


Anyhow,yesterday I received a request to help an MA student acquire some data for his master's thesis entitled “Neural Network modeling of semantic and associative networks.” I'm not sure what exactly his study is about, but he is looking for volunteers to spend about 5 minutes doing an online chained word association task. If you are interested, you can find the experiment here:

http://itp.uni-frankfurt.de/~mehran/WordAssociations/index.php?mode=ChainStart