Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

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

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

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.

Berkeley linguists present at 29mfm

May 10, 2022

Congrats to the following Berkeley linguists, who will be presenting at the 29th Manchester Phonology Meeting, taking place online from May 25 to 27. More information is available here.

Maks Dąbkowski: "A Q-Theoretic solution to A'ingae postlabial raising" Julianne Kapner: "Affixal and default fixed segmentism: New categories for fixed elements in reduplication" Katie Russell: "Nasalization in Atchan: Morpheme-specific harmony"

Additionally, Charles Chang (PhD 2010) will be featured as an invited speaker at a special session on "Second Language Phonology and Phonological Theory."

Dąbkowski presents at GLOW 45

April 20, 2022

Congrats to Maksymilian Dąbkowski, who will be giving a talk titled "Two grammars of A’ingae glottalization: A case for Cophonologies by Phase" at the 45th Generative Linguistics in the Old World (GLOW) Colloquium at Queen Mary University of London on 28 April. The program is available here: https://glowlinguistics.org/45/28-april-day-2-main-colloquium/

Sande speaks at Stanford

April 13, 2022

Hannah Sande will be giving a colloquium talk at Stanford called "Accounting for discontinuous vowel harmony in Guébie" (based on joint work with Emily Clem and Maks Dąbkowski). The talk will take place on April 26 at noon in the Greenberg room on the Stanford campus.