Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Fall 2009

AUGUST 31 - TAFFETA ELLIOTT, THEUNISSEN LABORATORY, HELEN WILLS NEUROSCIENCE INSTITUTE, UC BERKELEY: SPECTROTEMPORAL MODULATIONS ESSENTIAL FOR SPEECH COMPREHENSION AND SPEAKER GENDER IDENTIFICATION

The acoustic signal of speech is rich in temporal and frequency patterns. These power fluctuations in time and frequency are called modulations. Spoken words remain intelligible after drastic degradations in either time or frequency. To fully understand the perception of speech, and to be able to reduce the speech signal to essential components, we need to...

Fall 2012

PREVIOUS MEETINGS:

SEPTEMBER 10 - WILL CHANG
UC BERKELEY

Linguistic mirages and lexical borrowing between Tongan and Samoan

Despite more than a thousand years of cultural exchange between Tonga and Samoa before European contact, very few loanwords have been identified as having diffused between them, even though there is a large vocabulary peculiar to these two Polynesian languages. The difficulty lies in the fact that when Tongan and Samoan show related forms, it is almost always possible to reconstruct a Proto Polynesian form. One is...

Fall 2015 Previous Meetings AUGUST 31 - Larry M. Hyman (UC Berkeley)
Why underlying representations? SEPTEMBER 7 - No Meeting (Labor Day) SEPTEMBER 14 - Phorum Phround Phrobin (Come Prepared!)

We invite you to come with a phonetic or phonological topic or some interesting data that you are prepared to discuss for 5-10 minutes. If you do not have a topic to present, come prepared to ask questions and discuss the data that others bring!

SEPTEMBER 21 - Article Discussion (Ph Journal Club)

Finley, Sara. 2015. Learning nonadjacent dependencies in phonology: transparent vowels in vowel...

Fall 2017 August 28, 2017 - James Kirby (Edinburgh)

"Microprosody and tonogenesis"

Although the microprosodic basis of tonogenesis is well established (e.g. Matisoff, 1973; Hombert et al., 1979), the mechanics of exactly how the transfer of pitch occurs are not well understood. The classical phonologization model (e.g. Hyman, 1976) proposes that this process involves the exaggeration of low pitch from a voiced consonant to the following vowel: in other words, a textbook example of a phonetically gradual, lexically abrupt...