Computational and Experimental Methods

Linguistics events this week (Feb 8-15, 2019)

February 8, 2019

In and around the linguistics department in the next week:

BLS Workshop: Countability Distinctions - Friday Feb 8 & Saturday Feb 9
Join us for talks including keynotes by Suzi Lima (Toronto) and David Barner (UCSD)! The complete program is available here. Phorum - Monday Feb 11 - 1303 Dwinelle - 12-1pm Georgia Zellou, Michelle Cohn, & Bruno Ferenc Segedin (UCD): Talking Tech: How does voice-AI influence human speech? Linguistics Colloquium - Monday Feb 11 - 370 Dwinelle - 3:10-5pm
Larry Hyman: The Fall and Rise of Vowel Length in Bantu Fieldwork Forum - Wednesday Feb 13 - Dwinelle 1303 - 11-12:30PM
Andrew Garrett, Dmetri Hayes, and Ronald Sprouse: TBA SLUgS - Thursday Feb 14 - Dwinelle 1229 - 5-6pm
Viewing of Atlantis Linguistics & Near Eastern Studies special lecture - Friday Feb 15 - 254 Barrows Hall - 2pm
Lutz Edzard (University of Erlangen-Nürnberg): The morphosyntax of compounding in Semitic Syntax and Semantics Circle - Friday Feb 15 - Dwinelle 1303 - 3-4:30pm
Peter Jenks: TBA

PhonLab Annual Report 2018 published

January 23, 2019

The 2018 edition (volume number 14!) of the UC Berkeley PhonLab Annual Report is now up at https://escholarship.org/uc/bling_reports. This year's report includes 15 papers by faculty, students, and alumni:

Hyman, Larry M.: Causative and Passive High Tone in Bantu: Spurious or Proto? Rolle, Nicholas and Hyman, Larry M.: Phrase-level Prosodic Smothering in Makonde Johnson, Keith and Sjerps, Matthias: Speaker Normalization in Speech Perception Johnson, Keith: Vocal Tract Length Normalization Faytak, Matthew and Akumbu, Pius W.: Kejom (Babanki) Cychosz, Meg: Holistic Lexical Storage: Coarticulatory Evidence from Child Speech Garvin, Karee: An Acoustic Outlook on Initial Stops in Northern Shoshoni Cheng, Andrew: A Longitudinal Acoustic Study of Two Transgender Women on YouTube Cheng, Andrew: 1.5 Generation Korean Americans: Consonant and Vowel Production of Two Late Childhood Arrivals Melguy, Yevgeniy: Strengthening, Weakening and Variability: The Articulatory Correlates of Hypo- and Hyper-articulation in the Production of English Dental Fricatives Johnson, Keith: Speech Production Patterns in Producing Linguistic Contrasts are Partly Determined by Individual Differences in Anatomy Shibata, Andrew: The Influence of Dialect in Sound Symbolic Size Perception Dil, Sofea: Effects of Learning Strategies on Perception of L2 Intonation Patterns Zymet, Jesse: A Case for Parallelism: Reduplication-repair Interaction in Maragoli Faytak, Matthew: Articulatory Uniformity Through Articulatory Reuse: insights from an Ultrasound Study of Sūzhōu Chinese

Keith Johnson says: We have also moved all of the back issues of the Annual Report to escholarship.org where the archive will be indexed and maintained in perpetuity (thanks for the nudge in this direction, Andrew Garrett; and thanks to Ronald Sprouse for the technical support).

Berkeley linguists @ LSA 2019

October 3, 2018

The program for this year's LSA annual meeting has been released, and Berkeley linguistics will be represented in 14 talks and posters (plus an organized session) by students, faculty, and very recent alumni:

Kenneth Baclawski Jr.: Optional wh-movement is discourse-connected movement in Eastern Cham Amalia Skilton and David Peeters (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics): Speaker and addressee in spatial deixis: new experimental evidence Zachary O'Hagan: Two Sorts of Contrastive Topic in Caquinte Emily Clem and Virginia Dawson: Feature sharing and functional heads in concord Noga Zaslavsky (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Karee Garvin, Charles Kemp (University of Melbourne), Naftali Tishby (Hebrew University of Jerusalem), and Terry Regier: Color-naming evolution and efficiency: The case of Nafaanra Susan Lin and Myriam Lapierre: Articulatory patterns in contrasting nasal-stop sequences in Panará John Merrill (PhD '18): Polarity rules in Kobiana consonant mutation Jesse Zymet: Learning lexical trends together with idiosyncrasy: MaxEnt versus the mixed logit Andrew Cheng: Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent Emily Clem: The cyclic nature of Agree: Maximal projections as probes Nicholas Rolle (PhD '18): A cyclic account of a trigger-target asymmetry in concatenative vs. replacive tone Virginia Dawson: Disjunction scope can be lexically encoded: Evidence from Tiwa Tessa Scott: Cyclic linearization and the conjoint/disjoint alternation in Ndengeleko Martha Schwarz, Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, and Sharon Inkelas: Representing Segment Strength: New Applications of Q Theory [in the special session on Inside Segments, organized by Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, Martha Schwarz, Ryan Bennett, and Sharon Inkelas!]

Congrats all!

Conference double-header!

October 3, 2018

This weekend features two conferences at which Berkeley Linguistics will have a major presence, one each in the east and the west:

The Annual Meeting on Phonology, at UC San Diego, features work by faculty Larry Hyman and Jesse Zymet, along with alumni Nik Rolle (PhD 2018, now at Princeton), Hannah Sande (PhD 2017, now at Georgetown), Gabriela Caballero (PhD 2008, now at UCSD), Alan Yu (PhD 2003, now at Chicago), and Eugene Buckley (PhD 1992, now at Penn). NELS 49, at Cornell, features presentations by graduate students Emily Clem, Schuyler Laparle, and Tessa Scott, along with alum Maziar Toosarvandani (PhD 2010, now at UC Santa Cruz).

Congrats all!

Gahl named Mercator Fellow

October 4, 2018

Congrats to Susanne Gahl, who has just been named a Mercator Fellow by the DFG (German Research Foundation)! The fellowship lasts for three years and will support a collaboration with Ingo Plag and others at Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf.

Lexical competition in vowel articulation revisited: Vowel dispersion in the Easy/Hard database.

Susanne Gahl
2015

A widely-cited study investigating effects of recognition difficulty on the phonetic realization of words (Wright, 2004). Factors of lexical competition in vowel articulation. In J. Local, R. Ogden & R. Temple (Eds.), Papers in laboratory phonology, Vol. VI (pp. 26–50)) reported that vowel dispersion, i.e. distance from the center of the talker's F1/F2 space, was greater in words that represented difficult recognition targets (‘...