Cornell Phonetics Laboratory

Members of the Cornell Phonetics Lab
Christina Bjorndahl, graduate student Christina's current interests revolve around the status of ambiguous segments within an inventory. In particular, she is studying the phonology and phonetics of /v/, a segment which is famous for patterning both with obstruents and sonorants in Slavic languages, among others. She is currently running a phonetic study of [v] designed to compare its phonetic realization between three languages in which it patterns differently: Greek (obstruent), Serbian (sonorant) and Russian (both).

Becky Butler, graduate student Becky's research interests lie in the phonetics/phonology interface. Specifically, she is concerned with the phonetic correlates of registrogenesis and how these interact with phonological features. She is also interested in syllable types and constraints regarding word maximality. Most of her research languages are located in Southeast Asia.

Abby Cohn, professor and lab director Abby's research focuses on the nature of phonology and phonetics and their relationship.

Adam Cooper, researcher Adam's current work centers on the syllable. He is interested in exploring the types of evidence for syllable structure and assumptions underlying syllabification, with a special focus on establishing the status of the syllable in early Indo-European languages and Proto-Indo-European itself.

Eric Evans, staff technical consultant Eric provides support of all kinds, including system administration, network administration, programming, website development, assistance with data analysis, installation and maintenance of computers, working on digital audio and data acquisition equipment, and general management of lab equipment.

Alison Fisher, graduate student Alison is interested in the phonetic and phonological causes of sound change. She is currently investigating the possibility that Archaic Latin variable /-s/ is a prosodically conditioned phenomenon.

Masayuki Gibson, graduate student Masa's primary area of interest lies in the phonetics and phonology of tone and intonation. Through a series of production and perception experiments, he is investigating the interaction of lexical tone and sentential intonation in several languages to see which aspects of this interaction are language-specific and which are language-general.

Susan Hertz, adjunct professor Most of Sue's research is concerned with what role universal principles of human speech perception play in the organization of speech/sound patterns in language. She is currently developing a theory of how listeners extract phonological structure and other information, such as speaker identity, from the continuous speech signal. She is testing various hypotheses related to this theory through perceptual experiments involving utterances that contain mixes of natural and synthetic speech segments.

Seongyeon Ko, graduate student Seongyeon's primary research interests center around the phonetics, phonology, and typology of Northeast Asian languages, with special focus on the vowel contrast and vowel harmony in Korean, Mongolic, and Tungusic languages.

Peggy Renwick, graduate student Peggy works on the phonetics-phonology interface, and focuses on the Romance languages. She works on the history, acoustics, and perception of vowels in Romanian, and on coarticulation in Romanian and Italian. Peggy also has projects on speech rhythm.

Sam Tilsen, assistant professor Sam’s research explores the cognitive representation of speech sounds and the structure of the prosodic hierarchy. His experiments probe aspects of speech rhythm and articulation through manipulations that bias or perturb motor control. His experimental methodologies include speech-shadowing, working memory tasks, stop-signal paradigms, and the use of electromagnetic articulometry. He collaborates with cognitive neuroscientists using magnetoencephalography and fMRI, and is continuing to develop neurologically-inspired dynamical models of speech planning and production.

Draga Zec, professor and department chair Draga's research focuses on phonological theory, a study of the principles that govern the patterning of sound in individual languages, as well as cross-linguistically. She has worked in several areas of phonology and its interfaces: on the moraic theory of syllable structure, the representation of pitch accent, and both the phonology-morphology and the phonology-syntax interfaces.

Members of the Cornell Phonetics Lab