Stanford University| Department of Linguistics

Please check back regularly for updates and special announcements.

Upcoming Schedule

• Friday, February 3rd, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         paper discussion, continued
         Goldsmith & Riggle (to appear). Information theoretic approaches to
         phonological structure: the case of Finnish vowel harmony
  
  
• Friday, February 10th, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Ed King, Stanford University
         Praat Workshop: Sound manipulations for experimental linguistics
  
  
• Friday, February 17th, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Keith Johnson, University of California, Berkeley
         Title TBA
  
  
• Friday, February 24th, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Paul Kiparsky, Stanford University
         The Seto foot in speech and verse
  
  
• Friday, March 2nd, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         tentative speaker, TBA
  
  
• Friday, March 9th, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Rob Podesva, Stanford University
         Demonstration of airflow equipment
  
  
• Friday, March 16th, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Sam Bowman, Stanford University
         Title TBA
  
  

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Past Sessions

• Friday, September 30, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Introductions and Linguistics Lab Tour/Demos
  
  
• Friday, October 7, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Reiko Kataoka, University of California, Berkeley; Stanford University
         Phonetic and Cognitive Bases of Sound Changes - Past, Present, and Future
         ▽ Abstract

  In this talk I will report some of the main results from my dissertation research and will explore possible directions for future research. As a way to investigate phonetic and cognitive factors that may serve as preconditions of coarticulation-based sound changes, I examined how speakers of American English produce, perceive, and repeat the high back vowel /u/ in fronting and non-fronting contexts. Production study found that: (1) the relative acoustic difference between the fronted /u/ and the non-fronted /u/ remained across elicited ranges of vowel duration; and (2) the degree of acoustic variability was less for the fronted /u/ than for the non-fronted /u/. These results were interpreted as evidence that speakers have a distinct and more narrowly specified articulatory target for the fronted /u/ in the alveolar context than for the non-fronted /u/. Perception study found the evidence for (1) compensation for coarticulation (i.e., phonemic category boundary shift as a function of consonantal environment), (2) systematic individual variation in perceptual category judgments, and (3) similarity between the distributional properties of /u/ observed in the production experiment and the range of perceptual responses. Together, these results suggest that the one systematic source of individual variation in speech perception is individual differences in phonological grammar (perceptual category boundary), and that this grammar emerges in response to the ambient language data to which the listeners have been exposed. Finally, vowel repetition study found evidence for (1) compensation for coarticulation and (2) systematic individual variation in the repetition task as well as that (3) perceptual category boundary judgment guides vowel repetition behavior, suggesting that perceptual interpretation determines mental representation of spoken inputs.

  Based on these experiments, I contend that pronunciation variation emerges through a system of mutual dependency and multiple causal loops between and among speech perception, speech production, knowledge about pronunciation norm and ambient language data. These properties in language use govern the output of communicative interactions among members in a speech community, and one such output is member's knowledge of multiple sub-phonemic pronunciation categories that exist in any speech community. Additionally, I argue that any speech community is in a constant state of readiness to adopt an innovative pronunciation as a new community norm, because members have rich pronunciation repertoire even when there is no observable community-level sound change. The talk will end with discussion of the remaining issues.

  
  
  
• Wednesday, October 12, 8pm
  Gordon Biersch Brewery (640 Emerson Street, Palo Alto)
        
         October P-int Night
         (Phonetics and Phonology -interested Bar Night)
  
  
• Friday, October 14, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Ed King, Stanford University
         Praat tutorial
  
  
• Friday, October 21, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Lunch & Discussion: Current trends and topics in phonetics
  
  
• Friday, October 28, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Ryan Bennett, University of California, Santa Cruz
         Foot structure and cognitive bias: An artificial grammar investigation
         ▽ Abstract

  This paper defends the hypothesis that language learners are subject to a bias favoring foot-based phonotactic generalizations. Foot structure is evident in many languages lacking foot-dependent stress. If foot structure exists primarily to organize word-level rhythmic structure, the footing found in such languages is seemingly redundant. Why, then, do languages without foot-based accent employ the foot at all? One possibility is that speakers are subject to a cognitive bias favoring foot-based generalizations about phonological patterns. This paper reports on an artificial grammar experiment testing this hypothesis. Results from both English and Japanese speakers support the existence of such a foot-based parsing bias, which can be separated from the effects of L1 phonological knowledge.

  
  
  
• Friday, November 4, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Lunch & Discussion: Current trends and topics in phonology
  
  
• Friday, November 11, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Rebecca Starr, Stanford University
         Stephanie Shih, Stanford University; University of California, Berkeley
         Variation in moraicity in Japanese text-setting
         ▽ Abstract

  Text-setting is largely determined by a language’s most salient prosodic units (Yung 1991; Halle and Lerdahl 1993; Hayes 2009; a.o.). Japanese, which exhibits a dominantly moraic prosodic structure, is predicted to have a mora-based text-setting system (Hayes and Swiger 2008). The present study of translated Disney songs and native anime songs finds that, while mora-based text-setting is the default in Japanese, non-moraic variants are common, particularly in loan words and translation contexts. The results offer evidence towards the hypothesis that the differences in moraicity in Japanese partially stem from phonological differences present across Japanese lexical strata (Itô and Mester 1995).

  
  
  
• Tuesday, November 15, 8pm
  Gordon Biersch Brewery (640 Emerson Street, Palo Alto)
        
         November P-int Night
         (Phonetics and Phonology -interested Bar Night)
  
  
• Friday, November 18, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Ed King, Stanford University
         Syntactic probability affects pronunciation: the genitive alternation
         ▽ Abstract

  Probabilistic factors at the phonological, word, and syntactic levels all condition phonetic reduction in speech production, and accounts of these effects have been proposed within both speaker-internal and listener-oriented theories. This paper extends the documentation of probabilistic reduction to a novel syntactic construction, the genitive alternation (“the building's” vs. “of the building”). I present results of multivariate regression showing reliable effects of syntactic construction probability on the duration of the word “of” in the of-genitive. I further discuss how the contributions of individual regression factors (especially possessor animacy) lend support to a speaker-internal account of probabilistic reduction.

  
  
  
• Friday, November 26, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Thanksgiving Holiday
  
  
• Friday, December 2, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Middy Tice, Stanford University
         Melinda Woodley, University of California, Berkeley
         Second Language Phonology Affects First Language Speech Perception
         ▽ Abstract

  The idea that second language (L2) learners' phonological categories are tightly linked to their native language categories is not a new one (Laeufer 1996). Typically, the role of L2 phonology has been seen as subordinate to native (L1) phonology. However, in the present study we find that, though L1 and L2 categories may be tightly linked in early L2 acquisition, the relationship between them is not strictly one-way. Our findings demonstrate interference from the L2 on the L1 in both a phoneme discrimination task and a semantic priming experiment, underscoring the continued malleability of L1 phonological categories well into adulthood.

  Five beginning learners of French (L1 English) completed perception and production tasks in French and English on a weekly basis for four to six weeks (Tice et al. 2011). In a phoneme discrimination task, French and English phoneme perception appeared to be tightly linked; listeners used their L1 categories for both languages. However, in the 3-4 week L2 exposure range, participants began to show a shift in their category boundary for English, moving toward a lower, French-like boundary. By week five, their category boundaries had shifted back to L1 norms.

  This phoneme categorization finding is corroborated by the results of a semantic priming experiment, which also indicated category confusion during the 3-4 week exposure period. But unlike the categorization task, listeners did not switch back to L1 norms at week 5, instead showing further effects on their L1 processing.

  We hypothesize that the difference in tasks is due to the different types of linguistic processing required: explicit categorization versus lexical processing. The shifts in their perception may not only reflect their exposure to French, but also to French-accented English. These findings support recent work on cross-language effects (e.g. Flege, Schirru, and MacKay 2003, Flege 2007, Chang 2010), and dovetail neatly with exemplar-type models of speech perception.

  
  
  
• Friday, January 13th, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         Welcome back, and scheduling
  
  
• Tuesday, January 17th, 8pm
  Gordon Biersch Brewery (640 Emerson Street, Palo Alto)
        
         January P-int Night
         (Phonetics and Phonology -interested Bar Night)
  
  
• Friday, January 20th, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         paper discussion (Ed King)
         Goldsmith & Riggle (to appear). Information theoretic approaches to
         phonological structure: the case of Finnish vowel harmony
  
  
• Friday, January 27th, 12pm
  Greenberg Room, 460-r126
        
         paper discussion, continued
         Goldsmith & Riggle (to appear). Information theoretic approaches to
         phonological structure: the case of Finnish vowel harmony