Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Toward understanding the communication in sperm whales

J. Andreas
Gašper Beguš
M. Bronstein
R. Diamant
D. Delaney
S. Gero
S. Goldwasser
D. Gruber
S. de Haas
P. Malkin
N. Pavlov
R. Payne
G. Petri
D. Rus
P. Sharma
D. Tchernov
P. Tønnesen
A. Torralba
D. Vogt
R. Wood
2022

Machine learning has been advancing dramatically over the past decade. Most strides are human-based applications due to the availability of large-scale datasets; however, opportunities are ripe to apply this technology to more deeply understand non-human communication. We detail a scientific roadmap for advancing the understanding of communication of whales that can be built further upon as a template to decipher other forms of animal and non-human communication. Sperm whales, with their highly developed neuroanatomical features, cognitive abilities, social structures, and discrete...

Distinguishing cognitive from historical influences in phonology

Gašper Beguš
2022

Distinguishing cognitive influences from historical influences on human behavior has long been a disputed topic in behavioral sciences, including linguistics. The discussion is often complicated due to empirical evidence being consistent with both the cognitive and the historical approach. This article argues that phonology offers a unique test case for distinguishing historical and cognitive influences on grammar, and it proposes an experimental technique for testing the cognitive factor which controls for the historical factor. The article outlines a model called catalysis for...

Interpreting Intermediate Convolutional Layers In Unsupervised Acoustic Word Classification

Gašper Beguš
Alan Zhou
2022

Understanding how deep convolutional neural networks classify data has been subject to extensive research. This paper proposes a technique to visualize and interpret intermediate layers of unsupervised deep convolutional networks by averaging over individual feature maps in each convolutional layer and inferring underlying distributions of words with non-linear regression techniques. A GAN-based architecture (ciwGAN [1]) that includes a Generator, a Discriminator, and a classifier was trained on unlabeled sliced lexical items from TIMIT. The training process results in a deep...

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

Darya (Даша) Kavitskaya

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Linguistics

PhD, UC Berkeley

Slavic, Turkic, Uralic; phonology and phonetics, historical phonology

Sharon Inkelas

Professor of Linguistics; Associate Vice Provost for the Faculty and Special Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor on Sexual Violence/Sexual Harassment

PhD, Stanford

Phonology, morphology, and their interface; child phonology

Gašper Beguš

Assistant Professor of Linguistics

PhD, Harvard

Phonology, phonetics, computational linguistics, historical linguistics, Indo-European

Yiddish Linguistics

Isaac L. Bleaman
2020

Linguistic studies of Yiddish span several centuries and incorporate a wide range of research questions and methodologies, from philological analyses of Old Yiddish texts to generative approaches to particular grammatical constructions. The historical development of the language has undoubtedly been, and continues to be, the most hotly debated research topic in Yiddish linguistics. However, other productive areas of inquiry have included structural analysis (e.g., syntax, semantics, and phonology), dialectology and other fields of sociolinguistics (e.g., language contact and interspeaker...

The Gettysburg Corpus: Testing the Proposition That All Tense /æ/s Are Created Equal

Isaac L. Bleaman
Daniel Duncan
2021

Corpus studies of regional variation using raw language data from the internet focus predominantly on lexical variables in writing. However, online repositories such as YouTube offer the possibility of investigating regional differences using phonological variables, as well. This article demonstrates the viability of constructing a naturalistic speech corpus for sociophonetic research by analyzing hundreds of recitations of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. We first replicate a known result of phonetic research, namely, that English vowels are longer in duration before voiced...

Russell presents at RFP2022

May 10, 2022

Katherine Russell will be presenting on "Nasalization in Atchan: Sensitivity to morpheme identity" at the 19th meeting of the Réseau Français de Phonologie - French Phonology Network, which is taking place at the University of Porto, Portugal, June 7-9. A provisional program can be found here.