The Berkeley Phonetics, Phonology and Psycholinguistics Forum ("Phorum") is a weekly talk and discussion series featuring presentations on all aspects of phonetics, phonology, and psycholinguistics. We meet on Fridays from 4(:10)-5pm (unless specified otherwise below), in Dwinelle 1229 (Zoom link shared upon request). Phorum is organized by Kai Schenck. My email is "kai_schenck" @berkeley.edu.
Fall 2025
August 29
Introductions & round robin!
We'll share about our summers, then share any interesting puzzles or piece of data we've been working with. You are welcome to attend without presenting in the round robin.
September 5
Zach O'Hagan (UC Berkeley): Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy in Chamikuro
In this presentation I describe for the first time patterns of phonologically conditioned (suppletive) allomorphy in Chamikuro, an endangered Arawakan language of Peru, based on fieldwork with Alfonso Patow Chota (born 1925) in 2024 and 2025. I show that vowel length conditions the selection of two semantically equivalent nominal possessive suffixes (-ːne and -ˀte); that syllable rime conditions the selection both of two equivalent verbal object markers (-ne and -ale) and of forms of two parallel paradigms of verbal inflectional suffixes (one paradigm: -(ː)a, -ka, -ʰka, -aka, -jaka); and that various verbal suffixes exhibit V- and C-initial allomorphic pairs (some enclitics exhibit parallel V- and /j/-initial pairs), the selection of which feeds phonotactic violations that are repaired. Consequently I demonstrate that some patterns are phonologically optimizing while others are non-optimizing. I situate these patterns in a description of the phonotactics of the language, in particular the analysis of laryngeal codas, which differs from Parker's (1994, 2001) but more closely resembles Robertson's (2025) for related Yanesha', two types of epenthesis, and haplology.
September 12
Anna Björklund (UC Berkeley PhD recipient): Highlights in Nomlaki phonetics
Nomlaki (ISO: nol) is a language of Northern California without first-language speakers. Its audio documentation is limited to (at the time of writing) one 5-minute recording of speaker Sylvester Simmons and one 20-minute recording of speaker Andrew Freeman. This talk presents selected phonetic insights excerpted from my recently completed dissertation,
A Grammar of Nomlaki (Summer 2025), using Freeman's 20-minute recording (Swadesh and Melton 1953). Highlights include a discussion on the phonetics of Nomlaki vowels (including length, quality, duration, and stress), stops (including VOT, locus equations, and a typology of ejectives), lexical stress, and phrasal intonation. This work expands upon Björklund (2021) as the second published acoustic study of Nomlaki phonetics, and the first to discuss non-vowel data. These findings are brought to bear on Nomlaki's relation to Wintuan and Californian typology, as well as the problems of conducting phonetic research with limited archival materials.
September 19
AMP 2025 Practice Talks
Poster presentation: Maksymilian Dąbkowski - The phonology of sperm whale coda vowels
Poster presentation: Kai Schenck - A Dispersion-Theoretic analysis of Yurok glottal state gestures
September 26
No meeting -- Attend AMP 2025 instead!
October 3
Katie Russell (UC Berkeley): The typology of nasal contrast: The view from Kwa
The vast majority of languages across the world make use of the feature [nasal] contrastively within some domain. There are four logically possible ways in which languages may use the feature [nasal] in segment inventories (Cohn 1993, Clements et al. 2015): nasality may be contrastive for (A) neither vowels nor consonants, (B) vowels but not consonants, (C) consonants but not vowels, or (D) both vowels and consonants. Traditionally, in the literature, it has been assumed that all languages may be categorized as either Type C or Type D (Ferguson 1963), though it is clear today that there are groups of languages which are best analyzed as having systems of Types A and B in particular areas of the world. In this talk, I focus on the case of the Kwa branch of Niger-Congo, spoken across Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo and Benin. Within Kwa phonological systems of types B, C, and D are widely attested. Drawing on a survey of 45 Kwa varieties, I outline the diversity of systems of nasal contrast within the family, highlighting areas of particular theoretical interest (implosives! phonological alternations where the set of undergoers is not a natural class! interactions with morphology!) and suggesting possible historical pathways toward different types of nasal contrasts.
October 10
Hannah Sande (UC Berkeley) and Sansan Claude Hien: Puzzles in the Lobi (Gur) tone system: Downstep and floating tones
In this talk I describe the tone system of Lobi (Gur, Côte d'Ivoire and Burkina Faso) based on data collected between 2021-2025 with Lobi speaker Sansan Claude Hien. While there is some previous descriptive work on Lobi, there is very little prior work on the tone system and little to no analytical work on any aspect of the phonology of the language. I begin to address these gaps, pointing out two puzzles in the Lobi tone system along the way: the domain of downstep, and the morpheme-specific behavior of floating H tones.
October 17
Grace Brown (Stanford University): Gender Identity and Ideology Shape Perceptions of Masculinity in Male Speech
In perceptibly male speech, a fronted or higher spectral frequency /s/ is typically ideologically associated with non-normative masculinity (e.g., Munson et al. 2006; Campbell-Kibler 2007). However, most research on the perception of /s/ variation has centered cisgender listeners, leaving unexamined how gender-diverse individuals may orient differently to this acoustic cue. In this talk, I discuss how listeners’ gender identity influences their perception of /s/ variation across multiple male voices. I further argue that perceptual research should move beyond identity alone to consider how listeners’ gender ideologies influence their judgments of male speech. Results show that gender-diverse listeners, particularly those with gender-progressive ideologies, tend to resist “normative” perceptual patterns associated with male voices. These findings invite broader reflection on the intertwined roles of identity and ideology in sociolinguistic perception.
October 24
Nick Aoki (UC Davis): When multiple-talker exposure is necessary for generalization: Insights into the emergence of sociolinguistic perception
Phonetic variation correlates systematically with broad social categories (e.g., male and female sibilants tend to differ acoustically; Jongman et al., 2000). In turn, social cues can alter our perception of the speech signal (e.g., sibilant categorization is influenced by speaker gender; Strand & Johnson, 1996). What is unclear is how sociolinguistic perception arises. In other words, under what conditions do listeners learn that a particular phonetic variant is socially-mediated and can generalize to other group members?
In this talk, I revisit a longstanding question in linguistics and cognitive science about talker variability. Is multiple-talker exposure required for generalization to novel talkers, or is single-talker exposure sufficient? Across two studies, I highlight a critical role of listener experience on generalization. Multiple-talker exposure is unnecessary when exposed to more familiar types of speech (e.g., L2-accented English; Aoki & Zellou, 2025a), but necessary when exposed to
completely unfamiliar phonetic variants (e.g., a gendered, /p/ to [b] phonetic shift; Aoki & Zellou, 2025b).
These results enhance our theoretical understanding of generalization, offering insight into the emergence of sociolinguistic perception.
November 14
Sarah Ertel (UC Berkeley alumna): The Front Vowels of Eastern Washington English
Pacific Northwest (PNW) English is an English variety spoken in Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and parts of Montana. In particular, the state of Washington is divided into two distinct regions separated by the Cascade Mountain range: the densely populated, urban West and the less populated, more rural East. In addition to this geographical division, there are substantial political, economic, and ideological differences between the eastern and western regions of the
state.
In this talk, I discuss the front vowels of Eastern Washington English with a focus on prevelar and prenasal environments. These results will be examined in the context of prior studies of Western Washington English in Seattle (Freeman 2014, Swan 2020, Wassink 2016) and Cowlitz County (Stanley 2020), highlighting the diversity of speech within the PNW, the issues with broadly generalizing the features of PNW English, and the role that rural speech can play in understanding larger patterns within regional varieties.
December 5
Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): Metrical stress and glottal stops in A'ingae: A study of cyclicity and dominance at the interface of phonology and morphology
My dissertation presents a study of the morphophonology of metrical stress and glottal stops in A’ingae (or Cofán, iso 639-3: con), an Amazonian language isolate spoken in Ecuador and Colombia. A’ingae stress and glottalization trigger (and undergo) operations which reveal an interaction of two parameters: (i) stratum and (ii) stress dominance. First, verbal suffixes are organized in two morphophonological domains (or strata): inner and outer. The strata are mapped from word-internal morphosyntactic domains: vP and AspP correspond to the inner domain, while TP and CP correspond to the outer domain. Second, some verbal suffixes delete stress (i.e. they are dominant). Dominance is unpredictable and independent of the suffix’s domain, but dominance and the phonological domain interact in a non-trivial way: Only the inner dominant suffixes delete glottalization. Patterns of opacity show that the morphophonological processes triggered by A’ingae suffixes apply cyclically.
The A’ingae dataset demonstrates that a theory of the phonological architecture must be able to model phonological stratification while allowing for morpheme-specific phonological idiosyncrasies, but also that the phonological grammars of domains and of individual suffixes may intersect in a non-trivial way. Moreover, A’ingae’s major phonological domains (inner and outer) correspond to word-internal syntactic constituents, which shows that phonological analysis must be planted firmly on morphosyntactic ground. I formalize my account in Cophonologies by Phase (CbP) (Sande, Jenks, and Inkelas, 2020), which is a generative model of the morphosyntax-phonology interface. Since CbP accommodates the stated desiderata, it is uniquely suited for capturing the A’ingae grammatical patterns.
