Draga Zec gave an Invited Talk titled "Nasal consonants in syllable phonotactics" at the Fourth Belgrade International Meeting of English Phoneticians (BIMEP 4). March 30-31, 2018. 

Seung-Eun Kim presented a poster titled "Korean L2 learners’ sensitivity to prosodic boundaries in syntactic ambiguity resolution" at the 31st Annual CUNY Sentence Processing Conference (CUNY 2018), held March 15-17, 2018 at the Univesity of California, Davis

Poster Abstract:

Prosodic boundaries influence syntactic parsing and resolve syntactic ambiguity in spoken sentences. Compared to ample evidence on native speakers’ use of prosodic boundaries in sentence processing, relatively few studies have focused on L2 learners, and the results also varied: While many studies showed that L2 learners can use prosodic boundaries in sentence processing, some showed that they were sensitive, but failed to properly incorporate the prosody into a syntactic analysis.

The present study examines whether the finding that L2 learners are able to recognize prosodic boundaries holds true for Korean learners of English, and further investigates the aspect of the use of prosodic cues in syntactic disambiguation. Moreover, the study examines the effect of L2 proficiency in using prosodic information.

The Phonetics Lab held its annual Fall outing at Taughannock Park on October 15, 2017. The assembled adults and children hiked the South Rim Trail, which has many beautiful views of Taughannock Falls. The weather was sunny, warm, and absolutely perfect. Afterward everyone went to the Glenwood Pines for a lunch hosted by the P-Lab. It was a wonderful day for all, and we are fairly sure that the little ones didn't bring home any toads, bugs, or frogs to show their parents.

Phonetics grad student Hao Yi completed his PhD this summer, where he successfully defended his dissertation "Lexical Tone Gestures", where he experimentally studied lexical f0 control in Mandarin within the framework of Articulatory Phonology.

The tired but happy Hao is shown here with members of his thesis committee - from left to right: Dr. Draga Zec, Hao's thesis advisor Dr. Sam Tilsen, and Dr. Abby Cohn.
Hao is now working as a Speech and Data Scientist at Nuance Communications, Inc. in Mahwah, New Jersey. At Nuance, he is using his knowledge of linguistics and statistics to improve speech applications for understanding human language.