Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Johnson in Nature Communications

August 26, 2019

Keith Johnson was a member of a team (together with UCB Post-doc Matthias Sjerps, and UCSF Post-doc Neal Fox, and UCSF faculty Edward Chang) who have just published a new paper on "Speaker-normalized sound representations in the human auditory cortex" in Nature Communications.

Bossi, Wilbanks publish in Glossa

August 25, 2019

Congrats to Madeline Bossi and Eric Wilbanks, whose papers have each appeared this summer in Glossa!!

Bossi's paper is entitled V1 in Kipsigis: Head movement and discourse-based scrambling, co-authored with Michael Diercks.

Wilbanks' paper is entitled Sound change and coarticulatory variability involving English /ɹ/, co-authored with Bridget Smith, Jeff Mielke, and Lyra Magloughlin.

Save the date for the 2020 BLS workshop on Phonological Representations!

May 7, 2019

Announcing the 2020 BLS Workshop on “Phonological Representations: At the Crossroad Between Gradience and Categoricity”! Please mark your calendar for the workshop on Feb 7 & 8, 2020. Call for papers to follow.

Hyman delivers Whatmough Lecture

April 24, 2019

Congrats to Larry Hyman, who will be delivering the 14th Annual Joshua and Verona Whatmough Lecture at Harvard next week. Larry's talk is entitled The Fall and Rise of Vowel Length in Bantu.

Goldrick colloquium

April 10, 2019

The 2018-2019 colloquium series continues this coming Monday, April 15, with a talk by Matt Goldrick (Northwestern). Same time as always, same place as always: 3:10-5 p.m., 370 Dwinelle Hall. The talk is entitled Integration and Segregation in Bilingual Sound Structure Processing, and the abstract is as follows:

A key question in theories of language structure and processing is the degree to which different aspects of linguistic knowledge are processed independently or interactively. I'll discuss ongoing work that has examined these issues in the context of bilingual sound structure processing. When producing tongue twisters, bilinguals produce more overt, sound-category-changing speech errors than monolinguals, specifically within nonsense words consisting of language-unique sound structures (e.g., for Spanish-English bilinguals, nonce forms with initial /s/-stop clusters, which are found only in English). However, while 'shared' speech sound categories (e.g., initial stops) are less susceptible to overt errors, they are the locus of within-category deviations in phonetic properties -- an effect which may be magnified in cognate forms (e.g., teléfono/telephone for Spanish-English bilinguals). This suggests a model incorporating integration as well as segregation of sound structure and lexical knowledge, both within and across languages.

PHREND this weekend

April 3, 2019

Coming up this weekend is the Phonetics and Phonology Research Weekend, a.k.a. (PHREND). The workshop will be held Saturday, April 6, in Dwinelle 370, with a poster session to be held in the department hallway on Level A. Berkeley will be represented by Meg Cychosz, Karee Garvin, Emily Grabowski, Sharon Inkelas, Keith Johnson, Myriam Lapierre, Yevgeniy Melguy, Emily Remirez, Martha Schwarz, Alice Shen, and Jesse Zymet. The full program is available here.

LSA proceedings published

March 25, 2019

The 4th volume of the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America has just been published, showcasing research presented in January at the 2019 Annual Meeting. In the collection are three papers by students and faculty:

Kenneth Baclawski Jr.: Optional wh-movement is discourse-connected movement in Eastern Cham Virginia Dawson: Lexicalizing disjunction scope Martha Schwarz, Myriam Lapierre, Karee Garvin, Sharon Inkelas: Recent advances in Q theory: segment strength

Congrats all!

Linguists keep busy

March 21, 2019

Last weekend was a busy one for Berkeley linguists, with department members at conferences in Dwinelle Hall dedicated to Celtic and Amazonian languages as well as attending conferences in other locations!

Numerous Berkeley attendees at the Symposium on Amazonian Languages (SAL III)

Symposium on Amazonian Languages III

Virginia Dawson and Samantha Wathugala at Formal Approaches to South Asian Languages 9, Reed College, Portland (after presenting their paper, In support of a choice functional analysis of Sinhala ðə)

Dawson and Wathugala at FASAL

And to cap things off with some true linguistics in action: here's Susan Lin presenting Linguistics: making sense from noise at the East Bay Science Cafe, last Thursday (March 14).

Susan Lin presenting

Cheng at PLC

March 19, 2019

This coming weekend, Andrew Cheng will be presenting ‘School’ versus ‘Home’: California-based Korean Americans’ Context-dependent Production of /u/ and /oʊ/ at the 43rd Penn Linguistics Conference. Congrats, Andrew!