Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

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...

Phorum Archive

Past Phorum talks can be found here:

2026

2025

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Phorum 2026

Spring 2026 February 13

Kai Schenck (UC Berkeley): Unsupervised learning at the limits of phonology: unbounded circumambient patterns

Formal language theory (FLT) is able to quantify the computational complexity of phonological processes by treating them as string-based input-output mappings that are accepted by some formal grammar. Although non-optional phonological mappings have long been known to be a subset of the regular input-output mappings (Heinz 2011a), the attested phonological processes which require the most complexity to model are known as unbounded circumambient (UCA...

Nasality in Atchan: Synchrony, diachrony and typology

Katherine Russell
2026

The focus of this dissertation is nasality and nasalization in Atchan, a Potou language of the Kwa branch of Niger-Congo spoken in and around Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Unlike most of the world’s languages, Atchan lacks a phonemic contrast for nasality in consonants. Nasality nonetheless plays an important role in Atchan, at multiple levels of grammar. Drawing on data collected over years of documentation work with Atchan speakers, I propose that sur- face nasality in the language is attributable to three phenomena: lexically specified nasality at the level of the syllable, articulatorily...

Sexuality, gender, and the voice in (Bay Area) English

Amber Galvano
2026

The acoustic signal is the carrier of not only linguistic (as in, what the interlocutor intends to communicate) but also socio-cultural meaning (as in, who a speaker-listener is). The feld of sociophonetics hinges on the inextricability of these two facets of speech sounds. It has been established that speakers can both intentionally and unintentionally communicate aspects of social identity, including gender and sexuality, in the subtle distinctions present in their production of sounds in a given language system. In turn, listeners may draw upon the biases engendered by previous...

Aspects of Tone in Cua

Zach Wellstood
2026

This dissertation constitutes the first description and analysis of the tone system of Cua, a highly endangered and underdocumented Kalahari Khoe language of the Tshwa subgroup spoken in southeastern Botswana. This dissertation includes (i) an updated phonological sketch of Cua, including evidence of segmental contrasts and phonotactic constraints, (ii) an empirical overview of Cua’s tonal inventory, tonal phenomena, and tonal morphophonology, (iii) the results of a phonetic study on lexical tone in Cua conducted with 6 Cua speakers, and (iv) a phonological analysis of Cua tone which...

Phorum 2025

Spring 2025 January 31

Maksymilian Dąbkowski (UC Berkeley): The unpredictable but expected deglottalization in some former A'ingae derivatives

I describe and analyze the phonological form and historical trajectory of nominal derivatives in A’ingae (ISO 639-3: con), an underdocumented Amazonian isolate (Dąbkowski 2021). Some words historically derived with otherwise preglottalized nominalizers have lost their glottalization over time. I propose that these “exceptions” are reflexes of originally glottalized words, which underwent semantic shift and lost glottalization due to...

Keith Johnson

Professor of the Graduate School

PhD, Ohio State University

Linguistic phonetics, psycholinguistics, neurophonetics

Hannah Sande

Assistant Professor of Linguistics

PhD, UC Berkeley

Phonology, morphology, and their interface; prosody; language documentation and description; African languages, especially languages of Côte d'Ivoire

Metrical stress and glottal stops in A’ingae: A study of cyclicity and dominance at the interface of phonology and morphology

Maksymilian Dąbkowski
2025

This dissertation presents a theoretically informed study of A’ingae (or Cofán, iso 639-3:con), an Amazonian language isolate spoken in Ecuador and Colombia. The first part of the dissertation is descriptive. In a chapter on phonology, I touch on the language’s phonotactics, laryngeal agreement, diphthongal processes, recent sound changes, nasal spreading, as well as prosody and glottalization. In a chapter on morphosyntax, I describe the structure of A’ingae sentences, including matrix and (co)subordinate clauses, auxiliary verbs, serial verb constructions, wh-movement, and second-...