Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Garvin files dissertation

January 9, 2022

Congratulations to Karee Garvin, who filed her doctoral dissertation last month:

"Word-medial syllabification and gestural coordination"
Committee: Keith Johnson, Sharon Inkelas (co-chairs), Darya Kavitskaya

Twenty-eight years of vowels

Gahl, Susanne
Baayen, Harald
2019

Research on age-related changes in speech has primarily focused on comparing “young” vs. “elderly” adults. Yet, listeners are able to guess talker age more accurately than a binary distinction would imply, suggesting that acoustic characteristics of speech change continually and gradually throughout adulthood. We describe acoustic properties of vowels produced by eleven talkers based on naturalistic speech samples spanning a period of 28 years, from ages 21 to 49. We find that the position of vowels in F1/F2 space shifts towards the periphery with increasing talker age. Based on...

Didn't hear that coming: Effects of withholding phonetic cues to code-switching.

Alice Shen
Gahl, Susanne
Johnson, Keith
2020

Code-switching has been found to incur a processing cost in auditory comprehension. However, listeners may have access to anticipatory phonetic cues to code-switches (Piccinini & Garellek, 2014; Fricke et al., 2016), thus mitigating switch cost. We investigated effects of withholding anticipatory phonetic cues on code-switched word recognition by splicing English-to-Mandarin code-switches into unilingual English sentences. In a concept monitoring experiment, Mandarin–English bilinguals took longer to recognize code-switches, suggesting a switch cost. In an eye tracking experiment, the...

Outwards-sensitive phonologically conditioned allomorphy in Nez Perce.

Amy Rose Deal
Matthew Wolf
2016

Theories of allomorph selection differ in the extent to which they allow the realization of morphemes closer to the Root to be sensitive to the shape of more peripheral morphemes. In contrast to the full parallelism of classic Optimality Theory (OT), various current approaches posit that morphemes are realized one at a time (serially), beginning with the Root and proceeding outwards. This predicts that no phonologically conditioned outward-sensitive allomorphy should exist. In this chapter we discuss new evidence from Nez Perce that morpheme realization is partly, though in fact not...

Towards a Theory of Subsegmental and Subfeatural Representations: The Phonology and Typology of Nasality

Myriam Lapierre
2021

Word-medial syllabification and gestural coordination

Karee Garvin
2021

Locality in allomorphy and prelexical bundling: a case of tense and aspect

Amy Rose Deal
2018

Dąbkowski and Sande present at BCGL 14

December 8, 2021

Maksymilian Dąbkowski and Hannah Sande will be giving a talk at the 14th Brussels Conference on Generative Linguistics (BCGL) on Thursday, December 16, 2021 at 6:50AM Pacific. Their talk is entitled "Phonology-syntax interleaving in Guébie focus fronting." [abstract] [handout]

Hyman speaks at Cal State Fullerton

December 6, 2021

Larry Hyman will give a Zoom Linguistics Colloquium talk at California State University, Fullerton on Friday, December 10, 2:30-3:45 pm. The title of his talk is "Deverbal nominalizations in Runyankore." Click here for the abstract and registration link.

Cross-word morphologically conditioned scalar tone shift in Guébie

Hannah Sande
2018

This paper presents data bearing on two key issues in morphophonological theory: 1) the domain of phonological evaluation, and 2) the item- versus process-morphology debate. I present data from Guébie (Kru) [Côte d’Ivoire] showing that imperfective aspect is exponed by a scalar shift in surface tone, which can affect either the tone of the inflected verb, or the subject noun phrase. There are four tone heights in Guébie, and the first syllable of a verb can underlyingly be associated with any of the four tones. In imperfective contexts only, that initial verb tone lowers one step on...