Forrest Davis and Dr. Abby Cohn presented a poster titled  "Effects of lexical frequency and compositionality on phonological reduction in English compounds" at the 25th Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing Conference (AMLaP 2019), held Sep 6-8, 2019

Poster Abstract:

This work investigates the interplay between phonological reduction, lexical frequency effects, and relative compositionality of compounds. That is, are more opaque compounds (​cupboard)​ different from more transparent ones (​blueberry)​? ​

We establish a gradient measure for compositionality of a compound by conducting a survey of 24 native American English speakers. As a measure of phonological reduction, we utilize the duration of the final rime of the compound in the Buckeye Corpus compared to the duration of the same rime in monosyllabic nouns. For a measure of lexical frequency, we calculate the Pointwise mutual information (PMI) score for each compound using the frequency data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English.

Using a two-sample t-test we show that compounds with lower ratings of compositionality are significantly shorter in duration than would be predicted given the expected duration of their rimes. Additionally, we show that after controlling for a number of factors, compositionality in 21 compounds is a significant predictor of degree of phonological reduction in a linear regression model. Specifically, the degree of compositionality attributed to a nominal compound in English is a statistically significant factor in predicting the duration of the final rime of a compound. This yields a positive correlation, where the less compositional a compound is the shorter its final rime.

These results provide evidence that semantic opacity in compounds has reflexes in phonological form. We argue that phonological reduction needs to be addressed by both theoretical and empirical aspects of compound representation.

Dr. Abby Cohen and Rachel Vogel presented a paper titled "Variation in two patterns of word-initial deletion in Jakarta Indonesia: Insight from naturalistic data" at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS 2019), held August 5-9, 2019.

Paper Abstract: 

Based on naturalistic corpus data, we investigate two patterns of phonetic variation observed in Jakarta Indonesian (JI), an emerging variety of colloquial Indonesian spoken in and around Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta. Word-initial [s] ~ Ø is observed in grammatical forms and taken to be lexicalized, e.g. saja ~ aja ‘just’, sampe ~ ampe ‘until’. Word-initial [h] ~ Ø is more pervasive and said to be an optional phonological rule of H deletion, e.g. hari ~ ari ‘day’, habis ~ abis ‘finished’.

We examine the patterns of variation in these two variables for 20 speakers, in terms of lexical properties, frequency, phonological conditioning and socio-indexical factors—sex, education, and age—in order to contribute to a fuller understanding of patterns of inter- and intra- speaker variation in this rapidly developing language variety.

Draga Zec and Dr. Elizabeth Zsiga (Georgetown University) presented a paper titled "Serbian Pitch Accent from a Cross-Dialectal Perspective: Evidence for a Domain Generalization Effect” at the 27th Manchester Phonology Meeting, Manchester, England, held May 23-25, 2019

Draga Zec and Dr. Martin Krämer (The Arctic University of Norway) presented a paper titled “The variable vocalic nature of syllabic consonants” at the 27th Manchester Phonology Meeting, held in Manchester, England from May 23-25, 2019.