News

Former lecturer Alexandra Pfiffner and Baichen Du (former visiting undergraduate student) have published an article in Laboratory Phonology, titled "The co-variance of acoustic cues and lip gestures in the production of the Mandarin sibilant contrast." Check it out!

The Department of Spanish & Portuguese is pleased to welcome Miquel Simonet (University of Arizona), who will give a talk on Friday, Sept 11 at 12:00pm in the Spanish & Portuguese Library (Dwinelle 5125). The talk is titled “Vowel sandhi processes in Catalan and Spanish: Investigating the phonetics-phonology interface.”

Abstract: This presentation reports on the findings of three acoustic-phonetic studies examining the production of vowel sequences across word boundaries in Spanish and Catalan. The first two studies focus on Spanish and investigate the realization of the vowel sequences /ea/, /ae/, /eo/, and /oe/ across words, as in casa enorme and mono enano. The first project examines Castilian Spanish, the variety spoken in north-central Spain, while the second analyzes Southern Arizona Spanish. Traditional impressionistic descriptions have proposed differences in the phonetic realization of these sequences across the two varieties. A central goal of these studies is to determine whether such descriptions accurately reflect the acoustic-phonetic facts. The third study focuses on Majorcan Catalan, specifically the realization of stressed {/i a u/} + schwa sequences across word boundaries, as in argentí elegant and català enigmàtic. Impressionistic phonological accounts assume that the schwa is categorically deleted in these contexts, leaving only phonetic traces associated with the following vowel. Using acoustic evidence, this study evaluates the validity of these claims. Across the three projects, I ask whether impressionistic phonetic descriptions, used in subsequent phonological analyses, are corroborated by instrumental phonetic data. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for our understanding of phonologization and of the phonetics-phonology interface.

We're excited to announce that Katherine Russell, who recently completed her PhD in Linguistics at UC Berkeley, is joining the Script Encoding Initiative (SEI) this fall as a postdoctoral scholar, supporting the research stream on "neographies" – recently invented scripts.

This two-year position is made possible by a grant from the National Science Foundation, under its Science and Technology Studies program. Katherine's work will involve investigating the contexts for script invention, particularly in West Africa and Northeastern India, and how these scripts interact with digital standards.

Welcome (back), Katherine!

Congratulations to Gašper Beguš and co-author Peter Jurgec, whose article "Tone, stress, quantity, and quality: Prosodic patterns and tonal wug-tests in Žiri Slovenian" was published in the Journal of Phonetics!

Welcome to Mosiah Bluecloud, who is joining the Department of Linguistics as an Assistant Researcher during the 2026-2027 academic year and a Assistant Professor starting in fall 2027! Mosiah writes to say:

Aho chaaki kiinwa <Hello everyone; Kickapoo Greeting> My Kickapoo name is "Kewea" and it describes thunder that rolls back and forth across the sky. I'm a member of the Thunderclan within the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma. I've worked in Language Revitalization since I was 19. I've been a learner, a community teacher, and a high school teacher of Sauk, Kickapoo, and Shawnee (three related Algonquin languages). I'm so happy to be joining the Department of Linguistics here at UC Berkeley. I got my Bachelor's in Linguistics from the University of Oklahoma and my Master's and PhD in Linguistics from the University of Arizona. So I've slowly been making my way west in a way. I look forward to meeting everyone and learning more about everyone's work as I'm also especially excited to share my interests in language revitalization, language teaching, and community-based work. For me, starting somewhere new creates a mixture of excitement, anticipation and maybe even a tinge of anxiety. So I'm very thankful to everyone that has made me feel so welcome through emails, phone calls, Zoom meetings and coffee. Please don't hesitate to engage with me in collaboration/conversation. I'd like to meet as many of you as possible and I'm looking forward to this year and the years to follow.