Phorum

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 Mondays from 12(:10)-1pm (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.

Schedules from previous semesters can be found here.

Fall 2026

August 31

Round robin

September 14

Fabián Leonardo Malaver Chaparro (UC Berkeley): Stress-conditioned allomorphies in Korebajʉ  

This talk examines two prosodically conditioned allomorphic alternations in Korebajʉ, a Western Tukanoan language of the Colombian Amazon: a copular morpheme (-a ~ ∅) sensitive to the stress of the preceding syllable, and a negation morpheme (-ma ~ -mane) sensitive to the parity of syllables following it within its phase. Both patterns seem to require phonology and morphology to see across their usual boundary, a problem for modular grammars. Using corpus data from Cook & Criswell (1993) and Cook (1999), I show both alternations follow naturally within Cophonologies by Ph(r)ase, where exponent selection depends only on the metrical structure of the immediately preceding phase. The negation pattern additionally motivates a high syntactic base for the morpheme, in tension with the Mirror Principle. The results argue that Korebajʉ's iambic stress system is synchronically active, not a fossilized historical residue.

September 21

Gašper Beguš (UC Berkeley): Heavy syllable endings and the origin of Pre-PIE mobility

Proto-Indo-European featured a complex system of accentual and ablaut paradigms. In this paper, I outline a proposal for the development of accentual mobility in Pre-PIE. The accent-ablaut system is mostly described as morphologically conditioned, but its diachronic origin is likely phonetic. Based on the behavior of the most archaic lexical and morphological layer, root nouns and verbs, I argue that ending morphemes with heavy syllables attracted stress, which results in accentual mobility. While the rule was not phonetically active in PIE, it leaves traces and allows us to explain some forms that were difficult to explain. The rule also provides a simple phonetic motivation for a complex morphophonological system of PIE accentual mobility.

September 28

AMP 2026 Practice Presentations

October 19

Ilina Bhaya-Grossman (Stanford): Lexical stress encoding in the human speech cortex

Lexical stress is a critical feature that facilitates word segmentation and recognition in continuous speech. Here, we investigate how lexical stress is encoded in the human brain. Using high-density intracranial recordings from English speakers (n=11) listening to natural English sentences, we find neural populations on the temporal cortex that encode stress category beyond its acoustic cues. Single neurons recorded from the same brain regions largely do not encode stress category, suggesting that this representation emerges from a population level code. Finally, in Spanish speakers (n=8) listening to the same speech stimuli, stress category encoding is significantly weakened at neural populations. These results suggest lexical stress category is neurally encoded at the population level in a language-specific manner.

October 26

Julian Vargo

November 2

Hanyoung Byun

November 9

Niko Schwartz-Acosta

November 16

Aditi Lahiri

November 23

Jordan Crowley

November 30

Ian Carpick

December 7

Marie Tano

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