DMES presentations at TexFLEC

Texas Foreign Language Education Conference (TexFLEC will be held here at UT Austin on February 24th and 25th. Our theme this year is, “Welcome to the Classroom of Tomorrow: Forging the Future of Language Education.” We would love to have you join us.

We would also like to extend an invitation to students in your department. To that end, we were wondering if you could tell your students about TexFLEC. There are several presentations that we believe would be of interest to them, including:

• Literature in the First-Year Intensive Language Class by Dr. Tom Garza (Texas Language Center), Dr. Adi Raz (UT Middle Eastern Studies), Hope Fitzgerald (UT Middle Eastern Studies)
• Written Error Feedback from Perception to Practice: A Feedback on Feedback by Javad Abedifirouzjaie (UT Middle Eastern Studies) and Reza Norouzian (University of Tehran)
• Using Qualitative Methods to Investigate “Intermediate-High” and “Advanced”: A Study of Arabic Learners’ Vocabulary and Discourse Production in the Context of the ACTFL Oral Proficiency Interview by Summer Loomis (UT Middle Eastern Studies)
• In Promoting More Successful Second Language Learning Experiences: Classroom-based Projects by Lama Nasiff, Claire Meadows and Dyugu Uslu Ok (UT Foreign Language Education)

You can find more details about the conference on our Schedule and Abstract pages.
To register, please visit our registration page, and please remember to fill out the registration form, located at the top of the page.Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

Sincerely,
Amy Joseph
TexFLEC 2012 Co-Chair

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Historical Linguistics Circle – Spring 2012

The Historical Linguistics Circle (HLC) is an informal venue for people from many different departments around UT to present and discuss in-progress or completed research related in some way to language change.

Faculty, grad students, and undergrad students are all welcome to attend and/or present.

We meet about once every three weeks on Fridays at 3:00 PM in PAR 302.  Our first meeting of the Spring 2012 semester will be this Friday, Feb. 3. We have two presentations scheduled:

• Aimee Lawrence (Dept. of Linguistics) – “Reconstruction of Proto-Kampa (Amazonian) verbal morphology”
• Kyle Jerro (Dept. of Linguistics) – “NP-internal person agreement in Bantu”

We hope to see you there, and please forward this message to anyone you know who may be interested. To join our mailing list, please send request to  niamh.kelly@mail.utexas.edu

Thanks Sincerely,

 

Eric Campbell

Niamh Kelly

Vijay John

HLC organizers

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UT Department of Linguistics Presents a Colloquim: Rajeev Raizada

Mon, January 23, 2012

3:00 PM – 4:30 PM

UTC 3.134

The brain’s linguistic representations: from neural population codes to syllables and semantics.

In seeking to understand how the human brain represents language, neuroimaging faces a serious problem: brain images do not reveal mental representations. Recent work in neural decoding has shown that classifier algorithms can recover information from individual subjects’ fMRI data about the tasks and stimuli that evoked that activation. However, that decoding does not in itself tell us whether the classifiers extract information that is actually used by the brain. Nor does it tell us how the brain represents that information.

Addressing the first of those questions, I will present evidence from speech perception showing that multivoxel fMRI patterns can predict individual differences in people’s behavioral ability to discriminate between heard syllables. Addressing the second, I will show how the structure of linguistic representations can be related to the structure of similarity relations between neural activation patterns.

This generates a novel hypothesis about how the brain represents the meanings of words, which can be stated very simply: neural similarity matches semantic similarity. The predictive power of this approach can be demonstrated by decoding the meanings of words from fMRI activation: it achieves substantially greater accuracy than any previously published method. Finally, I will discuss some of the challenges and new questions raised by this research.

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