Lexical Effects in Perception of Tamil Geminates

Lexical status effects are a phenomenon in which listeners use their prior lexical knowledge of a language to identify ambiguous speech sounds in a word based on its word or nonword status. This phenomenon has been demonstrated for ambiguous initial English consonants (one example being the Ganong Effect, a phenomenon in which listeners perceive an ambiguous speech sound as a phoneme that would complete a real word rather than a nonsense word) as a supporting factor for top-down lexical processing affecting listeners' subsequent acoustic judgement, but not for ambiguous mid-word consonants in non-English languages. In this experiment, we attempt to look at ambiguous mid-word consonants with Tamil, a South Asian language in order to see if the same top-down lexical effect was applicable outside of English. These Tamil consonants can present as either singletons (single speech sounds) or geminates (doubled speech sounds).We hypothesized that by creating ambiguous stimuli between a geminate word kuppam and a singleton non-word like kubam, participants would be more likely to perceive the ambiguous sound as a phoneme that completes the real word rather than the nonword (in this case, perceiving the ambiguous sound as a /p/ for kuppam instead of kubam). Participants listened to the ambiguous stimuli in two separate sets of continua (kuppam/suppam and nakkam/pakkam) and then indicated which word they heard in a four-alternative forced choice word identification task. Results showed that participants identified the ambiguous sounds as the sound that completed the actual word, but only for one set of continua (kuppam/suppam). These data suggest that there may be strong top-down lexical effects for ambiguous sounds in certain stimuli in Tamil, but not others.No embargoAcademic Major: LinguisticsAcademic Major: Psycholog

The Making of a ‘Kumauni’ Artifact: The Epic Malushahi

This essay will look at the making of the social imaginary of Kumaun through the study of print media and the performance practice of a popular ballad from the region: Malushahi. During the last two centuries, this classic love story has seen various incarnations. It has been a part of many print versions in Kumauni, Garhwali, Hindi and English—as poetry, prose, a novel, plays, and stories for children. It has been included partially or in full in various folk collections of Kumaun. It has also generated a reasonable amount of discussion in academic circles. A definitive version of the text in Kumauni, Hindi and English, with notes and information about the singer Gopi Das, was produced by the anthropologist Konrad Meissner. Folklorists, historians, litterateurs, linguists, ethnomusicologists and anthropologists have paid great attention to both the form and content of its narrative. It has also been sung and recorded in many versions for radio, video, film, CD, DVD, and VCD. Various versions are available on YouTube. Probably its most popular form is that of a musical written and directed by Mohan Upreti and performed regularly since the 1980s by the Parvatiya Kala Kendra, Delhi. The transformation of this ballad from the folk repertoire to a modern musical and part of the canon of Kumauni literature marks the emergence of a Kumauni identity

Book Review: Seeing Through Texts: Doing Theology Among the Srivaisnavas of South India

A review of Francis X. Clooney\u27s Seeing Through Texts: Doing Theology Among the Srivaisnavas of South India

Edge states and the bulk-boundary correspondence in Dirac Hamiltonians

We present an analytic prescription for computing the edge dispersion E(k) of a tight-binding Dirac Hamiltonian terminated at an abrupt crystalline edge. Specifically, we consider translationally invariant Dirac Hamiltonians with nearest-layer interaction. We present and prove a geometric formula that relates the existence of surface states as well as their energy dispersion to properties of the bulk Hamiltonian. We further prove the bulk-boundary correspondence between the Chern number and the chiral edge modes for quantum Hall systems within the class of Hamiltonians studied in the paper. Our results can be extended to the case of continuum theories which are quadratic in the momentum, as well as other symmetry classes.Comment: 8 pages + appendice

Nullification of citizenship: negotiating authority without identity documents in coastal Odisha, India

This paper discusses the case of a community of Bengali immigrant settlers along the coast of Odisha in India at the centre of a unique citizenship controversy. Families have arrived here gradually over the years since 1947, and have generally acquired a range of identity documents from Indian state agencies. These documents certify to a range of rights that signal social and political participation within India: land ownership, voting rights and the receipt of official welfare subsidies. With little warning, a 2005 order by the state government following a high court directive led to the production of a list of 1551 persons, declaring such persons as ‘infiltrators’. The list ostensibly comprises those who have entered India illegally after 1971 or born to parents who entered illegally. While no deportation, as originally intended, has taken place, the nullification of their various documents of citizenship has created a void in their lives. This paper examines the wider politics of the case, especially focusing on how those with nullified documents negotiate the authority of the local state and actors within their own society, and what this reveals about the ever contested nature of citizenship in post-partition India