Dan Cameron Burgdorf

The Consonant/Vowel Distinction

My dissertation examined glides as a source of insight on the fundamental differences between consonants and vowels, combining data from several experiments and proposing a new way of modeling vowels in the framework of Articulatory Phonology. I'm currently pursuing some follow-up work on this. My committee consisted of Sam Tilsen, Abby Cohn, and Draga Zec.

Activation Noise

I've uncovered what I call activation noise, characteristic activity in high-order derivatives of articulatory trajectories that accompanies gesture onsets. I originally observed this in EMA data and recently replicated it in x-ray microbeam data, confirming that it is a general articulatory phenomenon and not an artifact of a particular technology. I'm currently refining methods for using activation noise to identify and characterize gesture onsets and offsets in much richer detail than is possible with velocity landmarks.

Burmese Tones

My work on Burmese focuses on the tones and the minor syllables, and what they can reveal about the underlying phonological structure. I spent the summer of 2018 collecting data in Myanmar, and I've found evidence of a weight distinction across tones that has intriguing implications for the minor syllables.

Gayogo̱hó:nǫ⁷ Website

In collaboration with others, I've been building a website to share materials from Cornell's Gayogo̱hó:nǫ⁷ (Cayuga) Language and Culture classes.

I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and got into linguistics by fortuitous accident after starting off my academic career with a dual-major in physics and chemistry. I still have a soft spot for physics and certain branches of mathematics. More recently, I've been teaching myself web development.

In my free time, I enjoy painting, making art out of waveforms, baking, cycling, and writing fiction. My first short story was published (under a pen name) in March 2022.