[koglist] Postdoc and PhD projects

Kedves Kollégák! Felhívjuk a figyelmet az alábbiakban olvasható PhD és posztdoktori lehetőségekre, amelyeket Hollandiában a Knowledge and Culture projekten belül hirdetnek meg. Jelentkezés a projekt vezeto"jénél: Prof. dr Johan Rooryck, Leiden University j.e.c.v.rooryck(a)hum.leidenuniv.nl 1. Postdoc Project: What is shared (and what is unique) in music and language 2. PhD project: Relative pitch in music and language 3. Postdoc project: Number in language: a typological study 4. PhD project: The acquisition of numerals and ordinals 1. Postdoc Project: What is shared (and what is unique) in music and language The Postdoc project will investigate the nature of the relationship between music and language. This researcher will attempt to integrate the insights from both research traditions introduced above, the theoretical-linguistic tradition and the developmental-experimental studies, and combine this with recent insights from the field of music cognition (cf. Honing 2011). The interest in the relationship between music and language is a long-standing one. While Lerdahl & Jackendoff (1983) built mostly on insights of metrical phonology of the time, more recent studies (Pesetsky & Katz 2009) draw attention to the parallels with current minimalist syntactic theory (Chomsky 1995) rather than phonology. However, if a large part of music is indeed preverbal (Honing 2010, Trehub 2003), does this also mean that syntactic or phonological operations and structures used in linguistics are preverbal as well? The project will inquire to what extent the results of both research traditions are complementary and where substantial gaps remain. A second question addressed in the Postdoc project is that of the intersection between music and language: what exactly are the *core knowledge systems *that are shared by music and language, and why are exactly these mechanisms shared rather than others? So far, the evidence for these conjectures has remained inconclusive. However, there are good reasons to believe that the search for shared processes and resources should continue. The strongest arguments derive from evolutionary considerations on the rather large set of cognitive functions that appear to be unique for humans. This suggests, for instance, that language and music will share properties with animal cognition (Fitch 2006), but at the same time that their human-specific features derive from a single common source (Hauser & McDermott 2003). On the other hand, there are also compelling reasons to consider music and language as two distinct cognitive systems. Recent findings in the neuroscience of music suggest that music is likely a cognitively unique and evolutionary distinct faculty (Peretz & Colheart 2003). We will refer to this position as the *modularity-hypothesis*. There is also considerable neurological evidence suggesting a dissociation between music and language functions (e.g., patients that, because of neurological damage, suffer from *amusia *while maintaining their ability to recognize words, and vice versa; cf. Peretz & Colheart 2003). This position can be contrasted with the *resource-sharing hypothesis *that suggests music and language share processing mechanisms, especially those of a syntactic nature, and that they are just distinct in terms of the lexicon used (Patel 2008). In the proposed research, we aim to identify what is shared and what is special about music and language. A clear candidate for a *shared *mechanism is syntactic processing, which is well attested in both language and music (Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983; Patel 2008). The aim of the current project is to investigate to what extent the evidence is converging, combining insights from the research traditions mentioned in the beginning of this subproject. A clear candidate for a *special *mechanism - a function that seems music-specific - is beatinduction, which seems to be limited to music and apparently inexistent in natural language. Picking up this regularity in music allows us to dance and make music together and is therefore considered a fundamental cognitive mechanism that might have contributed to the origins of music (Honing 2012; Winkler *et al. *2009). Interestingly, Patel (2008:404) suggests that beatinduction is an exception to his resource-sharing hypothesis, and a realistic candidate for a cognitive ability that is specific for music. 2. PhD project: Relative pitch in music and language The PhD project addresses the cognitive mechanism of relative pitch and how this human skill can throw light on the relation between music and language and musical ability. Just like beatinduction (see § 7.4.2), relative pitch has been argued to be a fundamental musical skill that is species-specific and domain-specific (McDermott & Hauser 2005; Peretz & Coltheart 2003). With regard to pitch perception, a significant amount of information is encoded in the contour patterns (i.e. rises and falls) of the pitch of acoustic signals, both in speech and music. For example, humans can easily recognize sentence types (e.g., statement, question, warning) on the basis of pitch contour alone in the absence of other information (Ladefoged 1982). The frequency transpositions of a melody are readily recognized by adult and infant listeners alike as the 'same', and are perceived as structural equivalents of the original melody (Trehub & Hannon 2006). Although human listeners can remember the exact musical intervals of familiar melodies, they appear to remember only the melodic contour of less familiar or novel stimuli (Dowling 1978). Unlike humans, who attend primarily to the relationships between sound elements, animals more heavily weight the absolute frequency of sound elements in their perceptual decisions and appear to be less sensitive to relative pitch changes (Yin *et al*. 2010). Developmental psychologists have shown that the aptitude for both absolute and relative pitch is present in all babies. However, by the time they are a few months old, a hierarchy in these abilities emerges, and babies gradually listen more to the relative aspects of a melody than to the absolute, actual pitch of the notes (Trehub & Hannon 2006). Relative pitch outclasses absolute hearing, as it were. Moreover, initial experimental evidence suggests that animals have no relative pitch, only absolute pitch (Yin *et al*. 2010). Research on rhesus monkeys showed that they only judged melodies as similar if they heard them at exactly the same pitch or if they were played at one or more octaves higher or lower than before (Wright *et al. *2000). A melody that was played only a few tones higher or lower was just dissimilar. Songbirds, too, only seem primarily attentive to absolute pitch. For them as well, a melody sung some semitones higher or lower represents a different melody (Kass *et al*. 1999). Apart from the fact that relative pitch enables us to recognize melodies without being influenced by their absolute pitch, this uniquely human skill is extremely helpful in recognizing many other melodic variants. As with beat induction, a more abstract way of listening is required. Thanks to relative pitch, humans are not only able to recognize two melodies as the same tune, but they can also identify one melody as a variant of another. How humans achieve this is still unclear. The questions addressed in this PhD project are the following: (1) What is the evidence for relative pitch as an innate or at least a spontaneously developing skill? (2) Is relative pitch shared with language, or are two different pitch perception systems involved for music and language? (3) What is the role of relative pitch in cultures with a tonal language? How does the semantics marked by pitch interact with the constraints of music? (4) Is there are relation between relative pitch and the core knowledge systems of number or geometry? If so, what is its nature? These questions aim at determining whether relative pitch perception is modular or shared, and in that sense similar to the Postdoc project. In addition to analyzing and interpreting the available evidence for either position, the PhD project will focus on the interaction between *congenital amusia *(or tone deafness; being unable to detect an out-of-tune note in a melody) and tone language processing. Some recent studies suggest modularity, with limited transfer from one domain to the other (Liu *et al. *2010; Nguyen *et al*. 2009). Finally, some evidence suggests that amusics have problems with subtle speech prosody, but no difficulty with 'natural' sentence stimuli (Patel *et al*. 2008). Interestingly, amusia also seems to be associated with deficits in spatial processing (Douglas & Bilkey 2007). Hence it could be that amusia is in fact a failure to implement a spatial representation of relative pitch (Williamson, Cocchini & Stewart 2011), linking the project on pitch to the core knowledge system of geometry. 3. Postdoc project: Number in language: a typological study This project studies the relation between the properties of the core knowledge system for number and the linguistic properties of numerals in the world's languages. The project focuses on the following questions: (1) a. Does the distinction between OTS and ANS manifest itself in the numeral systems of the languages of the world, and if so, how? b. What does the special linguistic status of 1 as opposed to all other numerals tell us about OTS and ANS? Linguistic evidence suggests that the split between OTS and ANS is reflected in the language system. Crosslinguistically, 1 to 3 (or 4) have linguistic properties that are different from those of the higher numbers (Hurford 1987): (i) no language has grammatical trial number unless it has dual number, and languages that distinguish a grammatical number higher than 3 are rare or non-existent (Greenberg 1963); (ii) ordinal suppletion (*first *instead of regular * one-th*, *second *instead of *two-th*) is cross-linguistically common but largely restricted to ordinals below *fourth *(Veselinova 1998; Stolz & Veselinova 2011); (iii) cross-linguistically, the words for 1 to 3 agree in gender and case with the noun, unlike numerals higher than 3. Studies on OTS do not attribute a special status to 1 vs. 2 and 3. However, linguistically the numeral 1 is distinct from all other cardinal numerals in many languages. In Hebrew, the word for 1 follows the noun while all other cardinal numerals precede it (Borer 2005). In Dutch, 1 is morphosyntactically distinct from the other cardinal numerals: it allows derivation with -*heid *'- ity'; but not with -*tal *'-some'; it can be modified by *zo *'so', *hoe *'how' and *te *'too'; and it is incompatible with EACH and EVERY (Barbiers 2007). In many languages, 1 has more in common with indefinite numerals such as MANY and FEW than with the cardinal numerals. Ordinals can be regularly derived from numerals, but 1, MANY and FEW block regular ordinal formation. As such, the behavior of 1 is surprisingly more similar to the approximate number properties of ANS than with the numerically distinct values of OTS. Children acquiring language first distinguish 1 from all other numerals (Spelke 2011). The project will therefore investigate the relation between the special linguistic status of 1 with respect to the core knowledge subsystems of ANS and OTS. The linguistic behavior of 1 might support Piazza's (2010) conclusions on the basis of neuroimaging techniques that OTS is not a proper subsystem of number in its own right. Importantly, the grammatical properties distinguishing ANS from OTS, and 1 from the other numerals, have not yet been systematically studied for a properly representative sample of the world's languages. This project will provide a more complete cross-linguistic typology of the morphosyntactic properties of cardinal numerals and quantifiers such as *many *and *few*. The study will include properties such as ordinal suppletion, inflection, case, derivational properties, syntactic distribution, modifiability and predicative use. A model will be provided to capture the linguistic similarities and differences between the numeral categories in terms of feature composition (see Barbiers 2007 and Harbour 2011). Distinct behavior of the numeral categories under the influence of the core knowledge system for number is expected to show up in all languages. The primary data source for this study is the *World Atlas of Linguistic Structures *(Dryer & Haspelmath 2011, Comrie 2011; http://wals.info/), which currently contains 2678 languages in 510 genera and 212 families, including relevant features for ordinal numerals (321 languages) and order of numeral and noun (1154 languages). Starting from these data we will select at least one language from each genus, completing the inventory with reference grammars and data elicitation. 4. PhD project: The acquisition of numerals and ordinals This project investigates the acquisition of numerals in relation to the development of the core knowledge system for number. The following research questions will be investigated: (2) a. What is the sequence of acquisition for (the morphosyntactic properties of) 1, the other numerals, and quantifiers such as MANY? b. How are words for ordinals acquired by children? c. How is the numeral for 2 acquired by children? Language acquisition experiments (Gelman & Gallistel 1978, Feigenson & Carey 2005, Le Corre & Carey 2007) show that two-year-old children who can count from 1 to 10 start with a distinction between numeral 1 and all other numerals. In give-a-number-tasks they give the experimenter one object when asked for one, for all other numerals they give a random number of objects but never one. The next numeral acquired is 2, then 3 and then the other cardinal numerals. If MANY has more properties in common with 1 than with the other cardinals (cf. §7.5.2), it is expected that MANY is acquired after 1 but before the other cardinals. The first goal of this subproject is to test this expectation, and to investigate the acquisition of the specific morphosyntactic properties of 1, 2, 3 and quantifiers such as MANY and FEW. The second goal is to study the acquisition of ordinals. Ordinals are often morphologically or syntactically derived from numeral stems. Their compositional complexity suggests that they are acquired after numerals. In many languages, ordinal formation adds a definite article or suffix to the cardinal. This has the semantic effect of picking out one discourse-anchored ordering of the set of orderings defined by the corresponding cardinal. We therefore expect ordinal formation to be acquired either simultaneously or after the acquisition of the definite article. The acquisition order of ordinals might be sensitive to the split between OTS and ANS. Since 1 is acquired before 2 which is acquired before the other numerals, the order of ordinal acquisition should be: FIRST - SECOND - THIRD etc., unless acquisition of ordinals comes in after the acquisition of the cardinals from 1 to 10. Interference with ordinal suppletion will also be investigated. As ordinal suppletion is restricted to OTS, the question arises what happens to suppletive forms in child language. In the acquisition of irregular verb forms, children go through various stages: correct irregular form (e.g. *ate*) > incorrect regular (i.e. overgeneralized) form; (*eated*) > mixtures (*ated*) > correct form (* ate*). Does something similar happen with suppletive ordinals, i.e. do we find overgeneralization of regular ordinal formation for 1, 2 and MANY? The third goal of this subproject is to investigate the acquisition of 2. Children go through a short stage where they use 2 but not the higher cardinals. 2 must therefore have special properties. Cross-linguistically this is confirmed by words such as PAIR, COUPLE and DUO. Our hypothesis is that children in the 2-stage initially take 2 to refer to a unit consisting of two parts rather than to a set of two elements. We expect children to apply 2 to twofold units first, e.g. shoes, eyes, before generalizing it to all sets of two elements. If 2 does not yet belong to the set of cardinal numerals at this stage, the child cannot have the regular ordinal such as Dutch *twee-de * 'second', if s/he has ordinals at all. A pilot study of the CHILDES database (http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/) shows that there are relatively few occurrences of cardinal and ordinal numerals in naturally occurring child language data. The ordinal system is acquired relatively late. These findings imply that the design of this project should include elicitation, perception, and judgment experiments involving children from age 2 until (at least) 8. Therefore a mixed longitudinal and cross-sectional study will be carried out in years 2-3 of the project including 3 groups of 25 Dutch children, ages 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, possibly extending to a fourth group age 8-9. While any language would in principle qualify, we choose Dutch because its morphosyntax has been well studied (e.g. Unsworth & Hulk (2010) for gender; Blom, Polišenská & Weerman (2006/7) for agreement; van Wijk (2007) for the plural; Veenstra *et al. *(2010) for quantitative *er*; Keij *et al. *(2012) for determiners). Experimental protocols will be developed on the basis of previous research, replicating these settings as closely as possible, and augmenting them for the investigation of their distinctive morphosyntactic properties.