Phonological (un)certainty weights lexical activation

Spoken word recognition involves at least two basic computations. First is matching acoustic input to phonological categories (e.g. /b/, /p/, /d/). Second is activating words consistent with those phonological categories. Here we test the hypothesis that the listener's probability distribution over lexical items is weighted by the outcome of both computations: uncertainty about phonological discretisation and the frequency of the selected word(s). To test this, we record neural responses in auditory cortex using magnetoencephalography, and model this activity as a function of the size and relative activation of lexical candidates. Our findings indicate that towards the beginning of a word, the processing system indeed weights lexical candidates by both phonological certainty and lexical frequency; however, later into the word, activation is weighted by frequency alone.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted at: Cognitive Modeling and Computational Linguistics (CMCL) 201

Queen-of-the-Mountain: A Game I Can Play

From the top, let it be known that I was dragged into this arena, persuaded to participate only out of friendship for the organizers. My avowed reluctance was a function of genuine puzzlement about my ability to add any notions of substance to an already overloaded panel (I objected to the number of panelists, concerned about front-end overload) and to concerns which to these simple-minded ears are far too academic for me to understand

Demanding Spaces: 1970s U.S. Women\u27s Novels as Sites of Struggle

This dissertation offers a new view of 1970s gender and race politics in the United States by analyzing struggles in and over space in four women’s novels: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays (1970), Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), and Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room (1977). My project reads space as a dynamic, politically charged realm of interactions between lived bodies, physical landscapes, and imaginative territories—including the formal characteristics of fiction. Using this critical lens, I highlight how these authors interrogate conditions of sexism and racism by representing their characters making and responding to “demands” for space. These demands occur through embodied, geographically oriented claims—claims to move freely, choose locations, construct one’s surroundings—as well as symbolic attempts to make room for new subjectivities, realign marginal positions, and establish common ground. The authors I consider also mirror these spatial struggles onto the innovative structures of their narratives through shifting voices and uneven or fragmented textual patterns, so that the novels themselves become “demanding spaces” of social action in form as well as content. By attending to these multilayered spaces in a group of texts published across the 1970s but never before placed in conversation, I shed new light on the intersections and frictions among feminist and other social movements of this time period. Just as importantly, I emphasize the possibilities in narrative for enacting and remapping those movements across the stretches of the published page. My reading of Play It As It Lays shows Didion expressing suspicion towards linear trajectories of women’s liberation by depicting impeded physical movements and blocked conversations and plots, while pointedly ignoring racial and classed inflections of mobility. I suggest that Morrison’s Sula explores the power and contingency of black female relationships through the interdependent movements of two young women, situating their journeys within a broader geographical and narrative landscape across which social inequities are marked out but also challenged. In Meridian, I contend, Walker self-consciously presents her titular character’s body—and the body of the text surrounding her—as mediums for negotiating ideological stances, so that the formulation of “the personal as political” is revealed as crucially important but also particularly burdensome for black women. In The Women’s Room, I find French cynically doubting women’s ability to “make room” for themselves through claiming their physical freedom as well as independent stories, but in presenting a purportedly universalized vision of women’s (lack of) liberation, French further marginalizes—even on the level of narration—the experiences of African Americans and women of color across the globe. Ultimately, I find within and among these novels charged debates about the parameters and trajectories of contemporary social movements and women’s roles within them. These debates are plotted out across the texts’ depicted physical geographies, in their symbolic rhetorics of spatial struggle, and in the terrains of their narrative forms

Conciliation ou agression : Un examen de quelques facteurs susceptibles d’influencer la politique étrangère soviétique au cours des années 80.

This paper analyzes the way in which internal forces are likely to affect Soviet foreign policy over the next few years. Four developments are examined: potential Soviet petroleum shortages, the growing Soviet Muslim population, the slowdown in the rate of economic growth in the Soviet Union, and the imminent post-Brezhnev succession struggle. The question is posed: Will these factors soon impel the Soviet Union toward foreign expansion and adventurism?It is our conclusion that two of these factors, the leveling off of oil production and the rapid growth of Soviet Muslims, are not likely to have a strong influence on Soviet foreign policy. On the other hand, the decline in growth rates and the demise of Brezhnev are likely to have a major impact on future Soviet policies. The Soviet system is not experiencing a terminal crisis, but it is definitely laboring under growing burdens. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that this will necessarily result in foreign expansion. A new, rejuvenated leadership may well seek a relaxation of tensions, as it did upon Stalin’s death in 1953, so as to create favorable conditions for dealing with its pressing problems. The future remains highly uncertain. International developments will be at least as important as domestic factors, and much will depend upon the policies adopted by Western governments