LINGUIST List 14.1345

Sat May 10 2003

Qs: Morphological Language Search; Drum Vocables

Editor for this issue: Naomi Fox <foxlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Brent Henderson, Looking for a languages
2. Aniruddh Patel, drum vocable experiment

Hi! I am looking for a language with a particular morphological
structure and having a hard time finding one. Maybe you can help. I
need a language where tense markers are suffixes on the verb form AND
which has prefixes on the verb form that carry a prosodic weight of
more than two syllables. The prefixes cannot include object agreement
or object clitics. Prefixes might include things like negation,
subject agreement, relative markers, etc. For example, the verb form
might look like Neg-SubjAgr-RelMarker-V-Tense where each of the
prefixes is one or more syllables. Of course, that's just an example.
The fact that tense is a suffix and that the prefixes total three or
more syllables is what is crucial. Thanks alot.

Dear Linguist List,

We are doing research on the acoustic and perceptual relationship of
speech sounds and drum sounds in North Indian tabla music. In this
tradition, spoken nonsense syllables are used to label drum
sounds. This way, players can communicate drum sequences either by
playing them or by speaking the associated syllables. We want to know
if it's possible for people who don't know Indian music to guess which
syllable goes with which drum sound.

We would like to invite anyone who is interested to try a web
experiment in which you match spoken syllables to drum sounds. This
web experiment is not being used to collect data for publication (we
are doing a lab study for that purpose). Rather, we are interested in
the acoustic and perceptual cues people use to make their decisions,
and invite your feedback on this issue (via a questionnaire at the end
of the experiment).
 
Here is a link to the experiment: http://www.nsi.edu/tablaexp

Please feel free to pass on this invitation to anyone who might be
interested.

Thank you,

Ani Patel, John Iversen, & Phil Mercurio
The Neurosciences Institute, San Diego, CA, USA