2021 Fall

Oct 15 Kathleen Hall (UBC), 12:10pm, Virtual meeting

"Testing “Message-Oriented” Phonology in the Signed Modality"

In this talk, I will explain the general principles of “Message-Oriented” phonology (MOP), in which language is situated as part of a communication system, and phonology arises at least in part due to pressures to communicate meaningful units both accurately and cost-effectively. I will consider the various predictions such an approach makes for phonological structures, and then show how those predictions can be usefully tested by comparing spoken to signed languages. In the course of that discussion, I will introduce some of the specific tools we have been developing at UBC to help facilitate such testing.

Nov 5 Anne Cutler (Western Sydney), 12:10pm, Virtual meeting

"Pragmatic Processing in Speech Perception: Prosody, Speaker Variation"

Some aspects of speech perception remain a mystery to researchers, for instance why the prosody of speech attracts so (comparatively) little attention in native speakers’ accounts of the structure of their language, and, presumably in consequence, receives little attention from second-language learners and teachers either. Nonetheless, there is growth in studies of how prosodic structure is used by listeners, across languages that differ phonologically, and the results can help us towards an explanation of these issues. This talk will discuss some recent results from studies of prosodic processing at both the lexical level and the sentence level, as well as studies of how listeners deal with speaker-specific variation, which suggest that there is an underlying common thread in how these sources of variation in speech are processed.

Slides could be downloaded: here

Nov 19 Lisa Davidson (NYU), 9:30am, Virtual meeting

"Glottalized segments & creaky prosody: how glottal elements are realized"

Glottalization can serve many functions in language, including as a consonant, a contrastive feature of vowels or sonorants, a prosodic marker or a sociolinguistic variable. This talk focuses on the consonantal and prosodic uses of glottalization, in particular the realization of glottal stops, and the interaction between glottal(ized) consonants and prosodic uses of creaky voice. In the first part of the talk, data from phonemic glottal stops in Hawaiian and from allophonic glottal stops in American English is analyzed to investigate how glottal stop implementation is affected by surrounding context. In the second part, acoustic cues distinguishing segmental from prosodic creak in American English are examined. Results indicate that glottal stops are rarely produced with a full closure, and that the extent of the period of glottalization depends on the adjacent sounds and word position in both Hawaiian and English. In English, acoustic differences in fundamental frequency, noise and spectral tilt measures distinguish segmental glottalization from prosodic creak. The versatility of glottalization within languages may be possible because both multiple acoustic cues and their timing can be manipulated in order to assist listeners in distinguishing the various uses.

Dec 3 Jianjing Kuang (UPenn), 9:30am, Virtual meeting

"Tone acquisition beyond F0"

Traditionally, tone is defined by a single dimension of the voice source: fundamental frequency, or F0. However, as demonstrated in my research, effective tone production and perception in fact integrates other articulatory and acoustic dimensions in the voice source (i.e. voice quality cues). Previous studies on tone acquisition and development mostly focus on f0 cues, and little is known how voice quality cues become integrated in the tone production and perception. In this talk, as the first step to answer this question, I will present evidence from computational modeling of tonal productions from Mandarin-speaking children and adults, showing that cue integration of f0 and voice quality cues in the tonal contrasts exhibits a developmental curve for Mandarin-speaking children. These findings support the multidimensional tone model proposed by Kuang (2013), and provide important new insights for tone acquisition.