The Phonetics Laboratory |
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Past Splunch TalksTuesdays at 12 noon (Spring 2008) The phonetics lab, 623 Williams Hall You can find the upcoming schedule for splunch here.
Feb 12, 2008:
Goldilocks meets the subset problem: Evaluating Error-Driven Constraint Demotion for OT language acquisition
Feb 5, 2008:
The Acoustic- and Visual-Phonetic Basis of Place of Articulation in
Excrescent Nasals
Jan 29, 2008:
Forced alignment as a tool and methodology for phonetics research
Jan 22, 2008: General Discussion Dec 4, 2007: Ani Nenkova, University of Pennsylvania
Nov 27, 2007:
Vowel Plots as a Diagnostic for the Nature of Loanword Integration in
Montreal French
Nov 13, 2007:
Learning word segmentation from acoustic data
Nov 6, 2007:
/k/ as as Sociolinguistic Variable Methodology and Results
Oct 30, 2007:
Pauses in Spontaneous Speech: Does syntactic context play a role?
Oct 25, 2007:
Oct 9, 2007:
The effect of language shift on a sound change in progress
Oct 2, 2007: NWAV practice talks
The spread of raising: opacity, lexicalization and diffusion
Sept 27, 2007:
Perception of Disfluency: Language Differences and Listener Bias
Sept 20, 2007:
Adaptive Training of Chinese Tones
April 12, 2007:
Context and Learning in Multilingual Tone and Pitch Accent
Recognition
April 5, 2007:
The suprasegmental features of Amharic
March 29, 2007:
Harmonic Grammar with linear programming
Mar 22, 2007:
The Trochaic Requirement
On the interaction of prosody and syntax in the history of English
with a few spotlights on German
Mar 15, 2007:
Praat-Py
Mar 1, 2007:
American English dialect perception experiment
Feb 22, 2007:
Dialectal and acoustic features of Vietnamese monopthongs
Feb 15, 2007:
The Real Effect of Word Frequency on Phonetic Variation
Feb 8, 2007:
Phonological Variation in Multi-dialectal Italy
Feb 1, 2007:
A simpler view of Danish stød
Jan 25, 2007:
Maybe tigers hibernate in Siberia
The phenomenon of Canadian Raising, as observed in Philadelphia and much of the northeastern United States, has typically been described as the centralization of the low up-gliding diphthong (ay) in pre-voiceless environments. However, some observations show that this categorical conditioning is breaking down. In my talk, I'll review some of the history of Canadian Raising and other similar phenomenon, and the motivations that have been put forward for the initial pre-voiceless conditioning. Then, I'll present the data I have collected so far, and my attempts at analyzing it. I also plan to fully embrace the informal nature of Splunch by making silly mistakes and not reading the entirety of the relevant literature
Jan 18, 2007:
General discussion
Dec 7, 2006:
Emerging Tonogenesis in Korean
This thesis proposes that the conditions conducive to tonogenesis are
present in modern Korean. The evidence centers on the aspirated and
unaspirated voiceless stops (and affricates) and the loss of an aspiration
distinction between them, with a tendency towards aspiration rather than a
lack thereof. It's clear that for at least some Seoul speakers, there is
no significant difference in VOT for these two obstruent series. The
difference in pitch on vowels following these consonants, already noticed
in the literature, seems the sole acoustic correlate maintaining the
distinction. Aspirated stops have a high following pitch, unaspirated
stops a low following pitch. Perception tests carried out by myself have
confirmed the reliance on pitch as a cue. Recordings of Korean were
modified such that the expected pitch, high or low, was reversed, and
listeners then reversed their responses as expected. This state of affairs
fits closely to one of the accepted causes of tonogenesis: the loss of
voicing contrast between voiced and voiceless stops. For this
dissertation, I plan to widen the scope of this inquiry. In terms of
speakers, I hope to find the geographic and age distributions of the
phonetic facts, through both further measurements and perception tests. In
terms of phonetics, further relevant elements will be examined, including
the acoustic correlates of other segments like the so-called tense stops,
as well as prosodic/intonational patterns.
Nov 16, 2006:
The Social and Linguistic Predictors of the Outcomes of Borrowing in the Speech
Community of Montreal
Nov 9, 2006:
Phrasal tone domains in San Mateo Huave
In the San Mateo dialect of Huave (isolate), utterances are divided into
phrases that each have exactly one H pitch peak. While the tone-
association rules provided in Noyer (1991) correctly predict where this
'phrasal H' tone will dock, how far it will spread, and whether it will be
flanked by L tones, a number of questions remain open about *how
utterances are parsed into tonal domains* in the first place. The current
study addresses this question in more detail, drawing on a new corpus of
325 phrases elicited from 5 native speakers. I discuss two basic findings:
1. Generally, a verb forms a single tonal domain with *all* following
arguments and modifiers, while preverbal subjects and adverbs phrase
separately.
2. While Huave is generally understood to have basic (S)VO word order, VOS
sentences were usually accepted and were sometimes produced spontaneously.
Notably, the generalization in (1) holds across V(O)S sentences:
*preverbal subjects form separate tonal domains, while postverbal subjects
group together with the verb.* Furthermore, the same pattern is found with
time/place adverbs that can appear on either side of the verb.
One possible explanation for this asymmetry, which I provisionally adopt,
is that postverbal subjects and adverbs are in fact structurally closer to
the verb than their preverbal counterparts, which have raised to a
clause-peripheral position. I'll talk about some implications of this
type of approach for future research on Huave syntax.
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Phonetics Laboratory
623 Williams Hall (campus map)
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305
| Telephone: (215) 898-0083
Fax: (215) 573-2091
For more information, contact Catherine Lai at
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