Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Galvano publishes in the Journal of Linguistic Geography

September 26, 2023

Amber Galvano and several co-authors from the University of Michigan have just published their article "Perceptions of regional origin and social attributes of phonetic variants used in Iberian Spanish" in the Journal of Linguistic Geography.

Dabkowski publishes in NLLT

September 22, 2023

Maksymilian Dabkowski published a paper on "Two grammars of A’ingae glottalization: A case for Cophonologies by Phase" in NLLT. You can read the paper here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11049-023-09574-5.

Dabkowski receives NSF grant

August 16, 2023
Congratulations to Maksymilian Dąbkowski who was awarded an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement grant entitled Nominal and deverbal morphology in an endangered language (i.e. A'ingae).

Sande receives NSF CAREER Award

August 16, 2023

Congratulations to Hannah Sande; who has received a 5-year CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation! The project is entitled Documentation, description, and analysis of multiword tone and harmony systems in four languages. The grant will fund language documentation work in Côte d'Ivoire, including fieldwork training for students, with a focus on harmony and tone processes that cross word...

Darya (Даша) Kavitskaya

Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Linguistics

PhD, UC Berkeley

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

Berkeley linguists @ ICPhS 2023

May 10, 2023

The following Berkeley linguists will be presenting their research at the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS), taking place in Prague in August:

Amber Galvano: "Cross-dialectal comparison of /st/ clusters in Spanish: Implications for sound change" Emily Grabowski: "Methodological trends in acoustic phonetic analysis" Keith Johnson: "Individual differences in Speech Production: What is 'Phonetic Substance'?" Yevgeniy Melguy: "Mechanisms of generalization for phonetic learning of accented speech" Alexandra Pfiffner and Julian Martinez-Garcia (BA 2023): "Spirantization of word-final plosives in Standard Dutch" Alexandra Pfiffner and Nicole Rosen (University of Manitoba): "Stop voicing in two settler communities on the Canadian Prairies"

Interpreting Intermediate Convolutional Layers of Generative CNNs Trained on Waveforms

Gašper Beguš
Alan Zhou
2022

This paper presents a technique to interpret and visualize intermediate layers in generative CNNs trained on raw speech data in an unsupervised manner. We argue that averaging over feature maps after ReLU activation in each transpose convolutional layer yields interpretable time-series data. This technique allows for acoustic analysis of intermediate layers that parallels the acoustic analysis of human speech data: we can extract F0, intensity, duration, formants, and other acoustic properties from intermediate layers in order to test where and how CNNs encode various types of...

Encoding of speech in convolutional layers and the brain stem based on language experience

Gašper Beguš
Alan Zhou
Christina Zhao
2023

Comparing artificial neural networks with outputs of neuroimaging techniques has recently seen substantial advances in (computer) vision and text-based language models. Here, we propose a framework to compare biological and artificial neural computations of spoken language representations and propose several new challenges to this paradigm. The proposed technique is based on a similar principle that underlies electroencephalography (EEG): averaging of neural (artificial or biological) activity across neurons in the time domain, and allows to compare encoding of any acoustic property in the...

Hyman and Agostinho chapter

April 10, 2023

Larry Hyman and Ana Lívia Agostinho, who was a visiting scholar in the department (2019-2020) from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil, have authored a new chapter together:

Ana Lívia Agostinho & Larry M. Hyman. 2023. Interpreting non-canonical word prosody in Afro-European contact. In Jeroen van de Weijer (ed.), Representing phonological detail, 151-169. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter Mouton.

Johnson speaks at PLC 47

March 14, 2023

Keith Johnson will be a keynote speaker at the 47th Penn Linguistics Conference, taking place March 18-19, with a talk on "Vowels in the Brain."