Phonetics Lab Projects
The Phonology of SesquisyllablesBecky Butler
A study which seeks to provide phonetic description and phonological explanation of sesquisyllables within and outside of Southeast Asian languages, by means of maximality constraints, markedness and articulation.
Registrogenesis in Bunong
Becky Butler
Phonetic investigation of the development of register in Bunong (Mnong) and how the phonetic cues to register interact with the phonology.
Partially nasal segments
Abby Cohn & Anastasia Riehl (Queen's University)
Phonological and phonetic investigation of partially nasal segments,
with particular focus on Austronesian languages
Relationship between phonology and phonetics
Abby Cohn
Nature of representations and patterning of sounds as often characterized as phonological or phonetic, with a particular focus on distinctive feature theory
Laboratory Phonology Handbook
Abby Cohn, Cecile Fougeron, Marie Huffman, Peggy Renwick
Editing the first handbook of Laboratory Phonology forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Syllabes and Segments
Adam Cooper and Draga Zec
Our goal is assembling a comprehensive database on the typology of syllables in the world's languages. We detail for each entry language aspects of its phonological system relevant for the structure of its syllables -- phonemic inventory, syllable shapes, including the details of segment distribution across syllable internal positions, syllable weight, tone and stress systems, etc. We are currently developing cross-linguistic typologies of syllabic cosonants and syllable codas.
Vowel systems in the Mongolic languages
Seongyeon Ko
Phonological, typological, and historical study of vowel systems of the Mongolic languages, with an implication on the Proto-Altaic vowel system.
Khalkha vowel harmony
Seongyeon Ko
Phonetic study of the vowel harmony and the neutral vowel /i/ in Khalkha (the standard Mongolian)
The phonetics of tongue root contrast in endangered Altaic languages
Seongyeon Ko (with Hijo Kang at Stony Brook University)
Phonetic study of the acoustic cues for the tongue root contrast found in endangered Altaic (mainly Mongolic and Tungusic) languages
Speech rhythm and phonotactics
Peggy Renwick
Investigation of the relationship between speech rhythm (syllable-, stress-, and mora-timed languages) and phonotactics, at the level of a language, corpus, or specific utterances.
Phonetics and Phonology of Metaphony in Romanian
Peggy Renwick
Historical, phonological and phonetic (acoustic and perceptual) study of vowel alternations in Romanian, including vowel raising and backing. Includes a comparative study of the acoustics of coarticulation in Romanian and Italian.
Rhythmic interference in speech planning
Sam Tilsen, John Houde (UCSF), and Sri Nagarajan (UCSF)
This project seeks to understand how rhythmic structure is represented in working memory and how this representation interacts with speech motor control. We are using magnetoencephalography to investigate correlations between rhythmic patterns in speech and low-frequency brain wave oscillations in auditory and premotor cortices during sub-vocal rehearsal. We are also investigating the influences of rhythmic patterns on articulatory kinematics by using electromagnetic articulometry.
Inhibitory control of speech motor planning
Sam Tilsen and Louis Goldstein (USC)
We are studying the representational dynamics of articulatory gestures and syllables by using a stop-signal paradigm in conjunction with electromagnetic articulometry.
Corpus analysis of speech rhythm using empirical mode decomposition
Sam Tilsen and Amalia Arvaniti (UCSD)
We are comparing interval-based rhythm metrics with envelope-based rhythm metrics, which are derived from Fourier analysis or empirical mode decomposition of the speech amplitude envelope. Our data are drawn from cross-language speech corpora elicited with a variety of methods, which allows us to investigate the comparative robustness of interval- and envelope-based metrics.
Effects of phonetic variation in the perception of speech
Sam Tilsen and Meghan Sumner (Stanford University)
This project examines how stimulus variation influences the magnitude of VOT perceptual boundary shift in accommodation of accented speech. In specific we are probing the interplay of stimulus order and decay of memory representations with the aim of understanding how boundaries change on a stimulus-by-stimulus timescale.
Phonetics and phonology of pitch accent explored on the Štokavian dialects of Serbian/Croatian
Draga Zec and Elizabeth Zsiga (Georgetown University)
In this project we analyze cross-dialectal phonetic variation of pitch accent in the Neo-Štokavian dialects, focusing on its systematic aspects, and on the emerging phonological patterns. In particular, we explore two types of dialects: those in which pitch and stress, the components parts of pitch accent, tend to occur on the same syllable, and those in which the two components tend to occur on distinct, most notably, contiguous syllables.