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Ian Maddieson (University of California, Berkeley)Complexity relationships in phonetic & phonological systemsIn Maddieson 2006, 2006b, I presented evidence that languages don't 'compensate' complexity by simplicity elsewhere in basicphonological subsystems. I briefly update these findings and extend the discussion to other phonological factors possibly relevant tocomplexity and whether a different encoding of the variables would yield different results. For reasons of data availability, thesefurther examinations must often be based on subsamples. I will discuss the possibility of constructing an integrated measure ofphonological complexity through simultaneous consideration of multiple factors. The relatively robust correlation between increasingsyllable complexity and increasing size of consonant inventory receives particular attention.Johanna Nichols (University of California, Berkeley)The distribution of complexity in the world's languagesComprehensive measures of linguistic complexity are revealing but time-consuming to survey. I propose a set of proxy and minimalproperties that can be surveyed more economically, and surveys complexity cross-linguistically. The worldwide distribution ofcomplexity, measured in this way, is not even; areas and even macroareas have rather clear complexity profiles. I also surveycorrelations of complexity with some sociological and sociolinguistic variables widely believed to correlate with complexity: literacy,size of speech community, known degree of contact with other languages, and known interethnic vs ethnic-specific status.François Pellegrino (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Lyon)Christophe Coupé (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Lyon)Egidio Marsico (Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage, Lyon)An information-theoretic approach to the balance of complexity between phonetics, phonology, & morphosyntaxAll human languages are fully functional. Still, linguistic typology provides extensive evidence that as far as a given component isconcerned, languages may be more or less complex. According to information theory, this means that the functional load associatedwith each linguistic component is language-dependent. This intuitive statement raises many questions about both the definition andmeasurement of the linguistic information and the possible compensation between the component loads within a language. Wepropose an approach based on the study of a seven-language speech corpus, mainly focusing on the interaction between the phonetic(speech rate), phonological (syllabic entropy), and higher levels (number of morphemes and words, etc.).Sheri Wells-Jensen (Bowling Green State University)A comparative psycholinguistic investigation of language complexityI approach the topic of language complexity from a strictly psycholinguistic perspective. In a systematic, cross-linguistic examinationof speech errors in English, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish, study participants narrated a fast-paced silent film, and the 1,300resulting errors were categorized. The data were used to examine two interrelated hypotheses about the relationship between languagestructure and the speech production system: Hypothesis A "As measured in this way, languages are equally complex;" and HypothesisB "The patterns of distribution of different types of errors will be distinct from one language to another." Both of the hypotheses weresupported.Douglas H. Whalen (Haskins Laboratories/National Science Foundation)Brain activations related to changes in speech complexitySpeech is perhaps the most complex sound that humans listen to. With functional magnetic resonance imaging, speech-specific areasshowed increased activation with increases in what we called ‘complexity’. In a follow-up study, small areas within superiortemporal gyrus increased activation with increasing complexity defined in several different ways. Particularly, contrasting /sta/ with/tag/ showed increased activation for /sta/ (constant number of segments but variable number of syllable slots). A new study contrastsmore syllables with clusters and changes in number of syllable slots used. The use of a simple passive listening task may indicatewhich linguistic structures exemplify greater complexity.78