Phonetics and phonology workshop archive

List of previous phonetics and phonology workshop speakers and topics

  • 2nd June 2023 (12:10-13:00), room 1.20, Dugald Stewart Building. Jeremy Steffman 'Biphone probabilities are rapidly updated in speech perception'. Abstract: Human speech perception has two properties (among others…): context-dependence and flexibility. In this talk I’ll present some recently completed experiments that examine the interplay between these two things. I’ll talk about biphone probability, that is, the probability (for a given language) that two phones will occur next to each other. I’ll show that this impacts perception of phonetic continua whereby listeners categorize ambiguous sounds as those that form higher probability sequences in their language. I’ll then show that these effects can be enhanced or overridden by short term exposure to probabilistically skewed biphone distributions over the course of an experiment, i.e. listeners track and update biphone probabilities and make use of them in the face of ambiguous information in the signal.
  • Extra session: Tuesday 23rd May 2023 (12:30-14:00), room 3.14, 50 George Square. Manchester Phonology Meeting practice talks. NOTE THE UNUSUAL TIME AND PLACE!
  • 12th May 2023 (12:10-13:00), room 1.17, Dugald Stewart Building. Stefano Coretta 'Reconsidering the IPA Vowel Quadrilateral'. Abstract: The IPA vowel chart is among one of the very first tools we learn as linguists. Linguistics students are asked to memorise the vocalic symbols and their position in the chart. Specifically, they are taught that the vertical axis of the chart corresponds to vocalic height distinctions and that the horizontal axis of the chart corresponds to frontness distinctions. These axioms (plus others) are imparted without allowing for any critique. However, since the very inception of the IPA, the characteristics of the vowel chart in particular have been put under the spotlight of an attempted debate (which seems to have been dismissed by the IPA committee of the time), initiated by at least two authors: Göran Hammarström in 1973 and Michael Ashby in 1989. More recently, Geoff Lindsey has criticised the traditional IPA vowel chart (by also invoking Peter Ladefoged's own critique) and proposed an alternative that commits to being a better representation of the vocalic acoustic space as we understand it from the measurements of formants. This talk will review the critiques of these and other authors and the main characteristics of the acoustic and articulatory space of vowels in support of Lindsey proposal. Specifically, we will see how the overall acoustic vocalic space of human languages is triangular and not trapezoid (as Daniel Jones would want us to believe) and how a triangular vowel chart solves the issue of descriptive phoneticians when they are faced with the choice of picking a vowel symbol for a particular vocalic sound.
  • NOTE THE UNUSUAL TIME AND PLACE! 27th April 2023 (11:10-12:00), room 1.17, Dugald Stewart Building. Bob Ladd 'Stress is relative, in two different ways'. Abstract: There is still no general agreement on what makes a word or syllable 'stand out' in the stream of speech, but many researchers have settled on the idea that stress or prominence consists of two distinct phenomena (e.g. word stress vs. sentence stress). Instead, I suggest that prominence involves two quite distinct types of relation between a word or syllable and its context, which we might call *local* and *non-local* prominence: a syllable can be prominent because it is longer or louder (etc.) than one or both of its immediate neighbours, but it can also be prominent by virtue of its place in a prosodic (or metrical) structure that can span longer stretches of speech. Such a distinction is well-motivated in music perception, where we know that the same phonetic material can be perceived in quite different ways depending on its structural interpretation. I will discuss various lines of evidence and present a variety of informal demos in support of this general idea.
  • 21st April 2023 (12:10-13:00), room S37, 7 George Square. Georges Sakr 'Notes on the Perception of Emphasis in Central Mount Lebanon Lebanese'.
  • 31st March 2023 (12:10-13:00), room S37, 7 George Square. Dan Wells 'Phonetic analysis of acoustic units automatically discovered in English speech by neural network'. Abstract: There has been much focus on so-called unsupervised learning in neural network-based speech processing, with the aim to learn powerful general-purpose representations of speech from raw audio without any accompanying annotation. Recent developments in this field have proven to yield useful features for tasks such as isolated phone recognition, automatic speech recognition and speaker identification. We might also investigate what linguistic information these representations hold in themselves, for example by clustering them into a discrete set of acoustic units and seeing how they align with reference phonetic transcripts. In this talk I will discuss such an analysis for one particular model of English speech (HuBERT), with a brief consideration of how it might also transfer to other languages.
  • 3rd March 2023 (12:10-13:00). Savio Meyase 'Tone representation and comparison in Tibeto-Burman NE Indian languages'.
  • 17th February 2023 (12:10-13:00), room S37, 7 George Square. Benjamin Elie 'Dynamic Articulatory Planning of Speech'.
  • 27th January 2023 (12:10-13:00), room S37, 7 George Square. Sonja Dahlgren 'Phonetic typology with ultrasound tongue imaging - comparison of Finnish and Italian'. (Rescheduled from semester 1.
  • 18th November 2022 (12:10-13:00), room S1, 7 George Square. Ricardo Napoleão de Souza 'Links between prosodic structure and lexical stress: Boundary marking in English, Spanish, and Portuguese'. Abstract: In addition to f0 movement, speakers use a variety of fine phonetic adjustments to group speech units, often in language-specific ways. Recent research also suggests that those adjustments bear a relationship to lexical prosody, for instance stressed syllables. This talk discusses acoustic properties of segments near phrase-initial (IP) boundaries based on experimental data from three languages that differ in how lexical stress affects words. Results suggest a close relationship between prosodic structure and word prosody, thereby highlighting linguistic rather than biomechanical underpinnings to the marking of boundaries. Additionally, this study provides novel data that could explain positional asymmetries in how unstressed vowels are expressed in Portuguese.
  • 4th November 2022 (12:10-13:00), room S1, 7 George Square. Gilly Marchini '/s/-lenition, vowel shortening and resyllabification in Southern Cone Spanish'.
  • 21st October 2022 (12:10-13:00), room S1, 7 George Square. Bert Remijsen 'From concatenative to non-concatenative morphology in West Nilotic - evidence from Shilluk'. [NOTE THAT THE ROOM HAS BEEN CHANGED since this was originally announced: we'll be in S1 in 7 George Square.]
  • 7th October 2022 (12:10-13:00), room S38, 7 George Square. Björn Köhnlein (Ohio State University) 'Let your feet carry you: how tones and segments are licensed by metrical structure'.
  • 23rd September 2022 (12:10-13:00), room S38, 7 George Square. P-Workshop kick-off session – come along and meet other P-people.

  • 25th February 2022 (12.10 start) Alice Turk 'Representations, Goals, and Processes in Speech Production'.
  • 11th February 2022 (12.10 start) Matt King 'Hypocoristics in Chilean Spanish: A Stratal OT approach'.
  • 21st January 2022 (12.10 start) Stefano Coretta 'Contextual variability in speech production as a source of sound change: Articulatory data as a window into the past, present and future'. Abstract: Can synchronic articulatory data shed light on diachronic phonology? If, adapting Givón's slogan to phonology, "today's variability is tomorrow's sound change, which is the day after tomorrow's variability", then the answer is a strong yes. This talk will cover a set of conceptual musings about the close link between articulation and sound change by reviewing recent experimental work on vowel duration and vowel nasalisation. In particular, we will see how ultrasound tongue imaging, electroglottography, and function MRI can afford us new perspectives on how articulatory mechanisms shape and constrain sound change. The talk will end with a list of possible further research ideas that would benefit from the approach advocated here.
  • 10th December 2021 (12.10 start) Mits Ota '(Dis)harmony effects in word form judgement and learning'.
  • 19th November 2021 (12.10 start) Yonatan Goldshtein (Aarhus University) 'Tone alone is not enough: how stød developed as a boundary cue'.
  • 5th November 2021 (12.10 start) Ryan Gehrmann 'Evidence for the Common Origins of Rime Glottalization in Northeastern Austroasiatic (Vietic, Bolyu, Bugan & Mang)'. Abstract: Prototypically, Mainland Southeast Asian languages have innovated tonal contrasts under conditioning from a combination of historical onset phonation contrasts and coda laryngeal contrasts (Matisoff 1973). In this tonogenetic context, historical rime glottalization is often reanalyzed as tone, the sắc-nặng tones in Vietnamese open and sonorant-final syllables being a prime example (Haudricourt 1954). Rime glottalization (*-ʔ or *-Nˀ) is uncontroversially reconstructable for Proto-Vietic, where it contrasted with non-glottalized rimes (*- or *-N) (Ferlus 2004). Comparable contrasts of rime glottalization or laryngealization appear in two other branches of Austroasiatic - Katuic and Pearic - however these contrasts are not cognate across the three branches (Diffloth 1989, Sidwell & Rau 2015). They are proposed to be independent innovations within each branch (Ferlus 2004; Gehrmann 2015, 2019; Sidwell 2019). Thus, at this time, Proto-Vietic rime glottalization is generally considered to be an innovation. However, evidence has been presented that Proto-Vietic rime glottalization contrast is in fact cognate with tonal contrasts in Bolyu, a language outside of Vietic (Benedict 1990, Edmondson & Gregerson 1996). Bolyu and Bugan, the Pakanic languages of southern China, and the Mang language of northern Vietnam are tentatively coordinated under a primary branch of Austroasiatic called Mangic (Sidwell 2021). In this paper, new evidence supporting the cognacy of Proto-Vietic rime glottalization with tonal contrasts in Bolyu, Bugan and Mang is presented. These correspondences are unique within Austroasiatic and, depending on whether they represent (1) a shared, northeastern innovation or (2) a retention from Proto-Austroasiatic, their existence has implications for either (1) the sub-classification of Austroasiatic (i.e. a new Vieto-Mangic Hypothesis) or (2) the reconstruction of Proto-Austroasiatic rime glottalization patterns (cf. Diffloth’s (1989) Proto-Austroasiatic Creaky Voice hypothesis), respectively. The relative merits of these two hypotheses are discussed.
  • 15th October 2021 (12.10 start) Jiayin Gao 'Recurrent sound change is drawn from a pool of systematic variation'. Abstract: The first part of my talk reviews reconstructed, incipient, or ongoing tonogenesis/tonal split, along with consonant devoicing/denasalisation in several languages I have worked on (Wu Chinese, Tamang, Korean, and Japanese). Preliminary observations suggest that the (unidirectional) change in laryngeal/nasal features (classically termed "fortition") along with the creation of a vocalic feature tends to be initiated in domain-initial positions. Whether such a positional/prosodic effect on sound change recurs needs more support from crosslinguistic data. The second part explores why this sound change may recur. It summarises experimental data from several studies of the EVOTONE project that test the consonant-pitch interaction in the laboratory. I will evaluate several models accounting for the phonetic motivations of sound changes, including recent proposals on prosodic domains. I will argue that while none of these models provide standalone explanations, the mechanisms underlying each model can each explain a part of the sound change described above. How these mechanisms constitute a causal chain determines whether and how sound change is initiated. I highlight the observation that higher-order linguistic structures tend to affect variations in different sound types (e.g., consonant vs. vowel) in a systematically different way, and propose that such systematicities may be one source initiating "recurrent sound changes".
  • 1st October 2021 (12.10 start) (virtual) P-Workshop kick-off session. This will be an online event – we will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.

  • 18th June 2021 (14.10 start) Tatiana Reid 'Floating suprasegmental component in Nuer'.
  • 14th May 2021 (14.10 start) Laura Arnold 'Highs and lows: Tone splits from vowel height in Raja Ampat'.
  • 26th March 2021 (14.10 start) Itamar Kastner will lead a discussion of: Zuraw, Kie, Ann M. Aly, Isabelle Lin & Adam J. Royer (2019) 'Gotta catch ’em all: Skills grading in undergraduate linguistics.' Language 95(4), e406-e427.
  • 19th March 2021 (14.10 start) Bert Remijsen 'A continuum of levels of juncture in Shilluk morphophonology'.
  • 5th March 2021 (14.10 start) Laura Arnold 'The tonal phonologies of three undocumented Raja Ampat languages'. Abstract: Six Austronesian languages are spoken in the Raja Ampat archipelago (West Papua province, Indonesia): Ambel, Batta, Biga, Matbat, and varieties of Ma'ya and Salawati. These languages all belong to the Raja Ampat-South Halmahera branch of South Halmahera-West New Guinea. To date, only Ambel, Matbat, and Ma'ya have been well-studied (e.g. Arnold 2018; Remijsen 2001; Remijsen 2007). These three languages are very unusual for the Austronesian family, in that they all have systems of lexical tone. In this talk, I will present a first look at data from the three other Raja Ampat languages – the Butlih variety of Salawati, Batta, and Biga – collected during a recent field trip (Nov 2019-Jan 2020). Using these data, I will present analyses of the phonologies of the three languages, focussing on the word-prosodic systems. I will show that Butlih Salawati, Batta, and Biga all have lexical tone, just like the better-described Raja Ampat languages. Besides presenting new data from these three little-studied languages, this presentation will also therefore expand our knowledge of tone in Austronesian. In addition, the tonal inventory of Biga is highly typologically unusual, in that the unmarked tonal category (tonelessness) is of a lower pitch than the two marked tonal categories (High and Extra-High). The data presented here will thus contribute to what is known about the cross-linguistic possibilities and frequencies of tonal inventories more widely.
  • 26th February 2021 (14.10 start) Gilly Marchini 'Vowel compression and Phonological rhythm in a speaker of Altiplateau Mexican Spanish'. Abstract: Vowel compression, although not a controversial topic, is much debated within Spanish. Despite previous claims that coda-induced compression, i.e., vowel shortening driven by the closing of a syllable, is universal, cross-dialectal Spanish-language research has questioned this, instead claiming that the complexity of the onset, not coda, is responsible for compression (Aldrich & Simonet 2019). In this talk, I will present on-going research into reduction patterns of Altiplateau Mexican Spanish, from Mexico’s Central Highlands (Mexico City, Toluca), which reveal that coda-induced compression is a feature of this variety. Durational, intensity and formant-frequency measurements from one speaker reveal that unstressed, mid and low vowels (/e, o, a/), centralise and shorten in word-final, post-tonic closed syllables. Using this data, I will argue for a dialect-specific approach to analysing compression effects prior to considering how dialect-specific phonetic-phonological interactions may allow certain varieties of Spanish to behave in a way typically associated with stress-timed languages, i.e., English (e.g., Frota & Vigário 2001). I will further link these results to wider debates concerning phonological rhythm, by considering: (i) how dialect-specific approaches bear upon fixed, dichotomous categorisations of stress- and syllable-timed languages (Dauer 1983, Smith & Rathcke 2020); and (ii) how findings relate to the controversial topic of rhythm metrics and the role of timing in marking prominence (Arvaniti 2009 2012, Turk & Shattuck-Hufnagel 2013). I will conclude by highlighting the next steps in the research and areas for development.
  • 12th February 2021 (14.10 start) Rebekka Puderbaugh 'What to transcribe when you’re transcribing'. This will be an online event – we will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.
  • 18th December 2020 (14.10 start) P-workshop Virtual Chris-diddly-istmas Session, run by Patrick Honeybone - bring your own drink and mince pies. This will be an online event – we will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.
  • 4th December 2020 (14.10 start) Mirella Blum 'Cross-dialect variation in tone systems: Comparing tone in two previously-undescribed dialects of Dinka.' This will be an online event – we will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.
  • 20th November 2020 (15.30 start – NOTE THE UNUSUAL TIME) Matt King 'Simple clitics in Italo-Romance: dialectal variation and phrasal phonology'. This will be an online event – we will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.
  • 30th October 2020 (14.10 start) Jiayin Gao and James Kirby 'When is onset f0 perturbation enhanced? And what is enhancement after all?'. This will be an online event – we will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.
  • 25th September 2020 (14.10 start) (virtual) P-Workshop kick-off session. This will be an online event – we will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.

  • 15th May 2020 (14.10 start) Virtual P-workshop: Pavel Iosad 'Icelandic preaspiration and lenition: A stratal and life-cycle analysis'. We will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.
  • 17th April 2020 (14.10 start) Virtual P-workshop: William Peralta 'Place of articulation effects on the production and perception of voicing'. We will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.
  • 3rd April 2020(14.10 start) Virtual P-workshop: Itamar Kastner and WIll Tyler 'Serialization and the syntax-prosody interface in Degema serial verb constructions'. This is a practice virtual poster for a presentation that is happening at the virtual GLOW conference. We will send information to the P-workshop mailing list on how to take part.
  • 24th January 2020 (14:10-15.00), room 1.20, DSB: Bob Ladd 'Eurocentric phonetics: The case of 'stress'. Abstract: Modern linguistics has largely stopped assuming the typological characteristics of European languages as a universal framework for describing languages elsewhere in the world. However, much current work on ‘stress’ still suffers from a Eurocentric perspective, both in its theoretical/typological expectations about how stress fits into phonology as a whole and in its methodological reliance on primary data based heavily on the impressions of listeners who are speakers of European languages. I outline some of the theoretical contradictions in current treatments of stress, and argue that they have been encouraged by (1) the early move in metrical phonology away from tree representations and toward grid representations, and (2) the concomitant elaboration of the notion of the foot. While the rhythmic phenomena that the foot is intended to account for are real, they are not universal and need not involve ‘stress’ under any phonetically defensible definition. Recognizing that stress is simply not a feature of many languages opens up a range of typological possibilities and provides a basis for empirically sound characterizations of the phonetic correlates of stress in languages that do have it.
  • 6th December 2019 (14:10-15.00), room 1.17, DSB: Vittoria Moresco 'Phonological awareness in bilingual children with dyslexia'.
  • 22nd November 2019 (14:10-15.00), room S38, 7 George Square: Pavel Iosad 'Russian yer quality is (almost) entirely predictable'.
  • 8th November 2019 (14:10-15.00), room S38, 7 George Square: Julian Bradfield 'Recursivity in phonology – what can it mean below the word?'
  • 25th October 2019 (14:10-15.00), room S38, 7 George Square: Patrick Honeybone 'Can phonotactics inhibit phonological change?'
  • 11th October 2019 (14:10-15.00), room LG.10, David Hume Tower: Georges Sakr 'Close-mid Monophthongs in Central Mount Lebanon Lebanese'.
  • 27th September 2019 (14:10-15.00), room S38, 7 George Square: P-Workshop kick-off session
  • 2nd September 2019 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB [NOTE UNUSUAL DAY - this is a Monday]: Christopher Heffner (University at Buffalo) 'Individual Differences in Phonetic Plasticity: Rate, Accent, and Learning'. Abstract: Speech understanding requires constant adjustment. This can be seen most radically when encountering new speech sound tokens in a second language, where categorizing non-native sounds requires learning. Yet adjustment to phonetic categories can be observed even within a native language, where tolerating variation between talkers in speech rate or in accent requires adaptation. Though non-native and native speech perception share similarities, it is unclear whether they rely on common cognitive resources. In the present study, we explore individual differences in each process in behavior. We focus first on adaptation to speech rate, finding that individual differences can be challenging in the world of rate adaptation. Next, we examine accent adaptation and both explicit learning and incidental learning of phonetic categories. In the end, we find interrelationships in performance on three of our measures of phonetic plasticity: explicit learning, accent adaptation, and rate adaptation. Better learners of non-native tokens in explicit tasks were also better adapters. This suggests that learning and adaptation may depend on shared behavioral plasticity.

  • 2nd April 2019 (13:10-14:00), roomS38, 7 George Square [NOTE UNUSUAL DAY - this is a Tuesday]: Alice Turk (joint work with Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel) 'Evidence for a 3-component model of speech production with symbolic phonological representations and phonology-extrinsic timing'.
  • 19th February 2019 (13:10-14:00), room 1.20, DSB [NOTE UNUSUAL DAY - this is a Tuesday]: Maria Dokovova (Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh) 'Processing the speech of L2 speakers with your L1 background.' Abstract: It is common knowledge that listening to an unfamiliar accent will slow down and impair your understanding. However, surprisingly little is known about the effects of listening to your native accent in the context of a second language. In this study 94 L1 Bulgarian - L2 English bilinguals listened to English words produced either by native English speakers or by fellow L1 Bulgarian - L2 English bilinguals. The accent of the words and the English proficiency of the listeners were used to predict the reaction times and accuracy of recognising the stimuli, as well as their pattern of adaptation. The results indicate that the accent of the words plays an important role for the accuracy, speed of recognition and speed of adaptation, while the English proficiency of the participants interacted with the accent in affecting the overall speed of recognition of the words.
  • 29th January 2019 (13:10-14:00), room 3.10, DSB [NOTE UNUSUAL DAY - this is a Tuesday]: Scott Sadowsky (Universidad Católica de Chile / Max Plank Institute, Jena) 'The sociolinguistics of Spanish vowels: it’s a thing!' Abstract: While vowels have long been an integral part of the sociolinguistic study of English, they have received scant attention in Spanish. What little research has been done on Spanish vowels has, with few exceptions, been either strictly descriptive or has compared the vowels of two countries. The paucity of research on their sociolinguistic variation seems to be due to the belief that little if any such variation actually exists. This talk presents a study of the effects of sex and socioeconomic status on the vowel allophones of 61 young adult speakers of Chilean Spanish. As a preliminary analysis showed that stress greatly influences vowel allophone production, the five vowels of Spanish were each divided into three classes: pre-stressed, stressed and post-stressed. The results show that the vowels of female and male speakers differ significantly in 12 of the 15 resulting vowel classes. They further show that the allophones of three vowel classes correlate significantly with SES in female speakers, while those of three different classes do so in male speakers. The rather extreme sex stratification of Chilean Spanish vowel allophones suggests that they play a key role in speakers’ sex/gender identity. Likewise, the six cases of socioeconomic stratification suggest that similarly stratified features of Chilean Spanish (in particular, the allophones of many consonants) are insufficient to meet young speakers’ needs in creating, signaling and identifying social identities. In light of these findings, I argue that the time has come for a new focus on the sociolinguistics of the vowels of all Spanish varieties.
  • 7th December 2018 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Rebekka Puderbaugh 'Acoustic description of laryngeal contrasts in Upper Necaxa Totonac'
  • 16th November 2018 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: James Kirby 'Perception of laryngeal contrast in Madurese'. Abstract: We present a study of native speaker perception of the putative three-way laryngeal contrast in the Malayo-Polynesian language Madurese. Madurese is notable for an unusual CV co-occurrence restriction, but it is not clear whether the salient perceptual cues to CV sequences are localized in the consonants or in the vowels. The results of perceptual identification and discrimination experiments suggests that, despite producing small but robust VOT differences between voiceless stops in production, these differences are not exploited by listeners in perception. Although two features are therefore necessary to define the laryngeal contrast in Madurese, one of these is highly abstract, and the contrast in voiceless stops is defined in terms of this feature rather than in terms of [spread].
  • 2nd November 2018 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Ryan Gehrmann 'Katuic presyllables and derivational morphology in diachronic perspective'
  • 19th October 2018 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Bert Remijsen 'Phonetics, phonology and morphophonology of vocalic quantity in Shilluk'
  • 28th September 2018 (12:10-13:00), room 3.11, DSB [NOTE UNUSUAL TIME]: François Conrad (Leibniz Universität Hannover ) 'Insights into the phonetics and phonology of Luxembourgish'. Abstract: Luxembourgish is a West-Germanic language spoken by only about 400.000 speakers. How does this language sound like and what's the structure of its sound system? And what are the linguistic repercussions of the strong (language) contact with German (East) and French (West and South) since many centuries that shaped not only the language itself but the country as a whole? François Conrad is going to present some answers to these questions in the light of his current research projects.

  • 7th June 2018 (13:10-14:00), room 1.20, DSB: Pavel Iosad 'There is no problem of /v/ in Russian phonology'.
  • 10th May 2018 (13:10-14:00), room 3.10, DSB: Rosalía Rodríguez-Vázquez (University of Vigo) 'Intonation accommodation in a language contact situation: the case of Galician Spanish'.
  • 3rd May 2018 (13:10-14:00), room 1.20, DSB: Bert Remijsen 'Phantom vowels in Shilluk'.
  • 22nd March 2018 (13.10-14.00), room 1.20, DSB: Discussion of: Bennett, Wm & Sharon Rose (2017) 'Moro voicelessness dissimilation and binary [voice].' Phonology 34, 473–505. This is a paper discussion and dissection session. Can we come up with alternative analyses for the data? Everyone should read the paper in advance of the session, so that we are all familiar with the data. We'll meet to talk about it. Anyone who would like can have a 5 - 10 minute slot (with a maximum of 2 or 3 slides) to propose a possible alternative analysis. Or if you think the analysis in the paper is right, to say why.
  • 21st February 2018 (14.10-15.00), room 1.17, DSB [NOTE UNUSUAL DAY and TIME - THIS IS A WEDNESDAY]: Patrick Honeybone 'English r-sandhi for the 50 millionth time (but this time taking variation seriously)' [Joint meeting with the English Language Research Group and the Language Variation and Change Research Group.]
  • 10th January 2018 (13:10-14:00), room 3.10, DSB [NOTE UNUSUAL DAY - THIS IS A WEDNESDAY]: Alexander Martin 'Relating perception and production in contact-induced change'. Abstract: The Dutch stop inventory contrasts prevoiced from voiceless stops both initially and medially, but not at all places of articulation. Indeed historically, Dutch has lacked the phoneme /ɡ/. Recently, however, many words have been borrowed from neighboring languages, including over 1,300 from English, and this heretofore foreign sound has been creeping its way into the language, to the extent that now even a minimal pair between native /k/ and emerging /ɡ/ exists: /koːl/, cabbage ~ /ɡoːl/, goal. We examined the extent of this change first by exploiting the Corpus Gesproken Nederlands and found a significant correlation between the population density of a region and the proportion of use of the new phoneme there. We then tested 51 native speakers of Dutch from all over the Low Countries and replicated this effect at the level of speakers’ hometowns. We further found a negative correlation between speakers’ VOTs of this new segment and their proportion of use of it in production, indicating a link between individual phonetics and phonology (i.e., speakers with a stronger phonetic contrast between native /k/ and emerging /ɡ/ were more likely to use /ɡ/ in loanwords). We also tested the same speakers on their perception of the new /k/~/ɡ/ contrast compared to native /p/~/b/ and found that speakers who are better at perceiving the new contrast also tend to use it more in production. Overall, our results indicate that the adoption of the new sound is relatively advanced in the young population we tested, but is still modulated by an array of individual-level factors including region of origin and ability to perceive the emerging contrast. We will discuss potential social and linguistic factors that might contribute to the evolution of this change.
  • 11 December 2017 [NB: this is a Monday], 12.10-1pm , room 3.11, DSB: Lynn Clark (University of Canterbury) 'Medial /t/s in Middle Earth' [Joint meeting with the English Language Research Group and the Language Variation and Change Research Group.] Abstract: Compared with some other varieties of English around the world, New Zealand English (NZE) has a very small number of speakers. Despite this, work on NZE has had a disproportionately large impact on the field of Linguistics, not only in the description of this new variety but, crucially, in the development of models of phonological variation and change and new dialect formation. This has been made possible because of the availability of a number of different spoken corpora in New Zealand which span different time points in the development of this new variety, from its inception to the present day. Today, I will show how I have been using three different spoken corpora of NZE to investigate novel areas of linguistic research. First, using a corpus of spoken monologues, I will discuss patterns of within-speaker phonetic variation (in word medial, intervocalic /t/) that are similar to the types of priming effects we see in experimental psycholinguistic work. Next, using a corpus of contemporary conversation, I explore the extent to which these priming effects (again in medial /t/) are apparent in dyadic conversation. Finally, using a spoken corpus with a sizeable time depth, I investigate some aspects of long-term cross-speaker variability which could have taken place in early NZ English – in this part of the paper I consider the impact of the Scottish Vowel Length Rule on early NZ English.
  • 2nd November 2017 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Erich Round (University of Queensland) 'Phonological phylogenetics'. Abstract: I discuss a science of 'phonological phylogenetics', in which synchrony and diachrony are viewed respectively as the knowable outcomes of inferable history. The adjectives here are important. Synchrony is knowable but not directly observable. All phonological data is the product of analysis, and since phonological analysis is non-deterministic, it is vital to ascertain how we should respond to the fact that our data contains significant uncertainty, of a rather particular type. The challenges this presents, and some initial, novel solutions are discussed. Meanwhile, diachrony is inferable but not entirely knowable. Reconstructions are probabilistic, and consequently some of our best tools are those of historical statistical inference. This is fortunate, since a great deal of fundamental mathematical research has already been done and we can now take advantage of it. As an example, I introduce the AusPhon-Lexicon database, containing comparably phonemicized lexicons of 240 Australian languages: around 330,000 lexical forms, or 2 million segments. The database is generative, and can derive any number of datasets according to the research question of the user. I show that the phonotactics of Australian laminal consonants, long thought to be distributed overwhelmingly according to areal / language-contact effects, can be shown in fact to harbour strong, vertical phylogenetic signal within the Pama-Nyungan language family, estimated to be on the order of 5,000 years old.
  • 28th September 2017 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Sam Tilsen (Cornell University) 'Selection-coordination theory: viewing phonological structure as a projection over developmental time.' Abstract: Many phonological theories analyze speech as a hierarchical structure of segments, moras, and syllables, and this sort of structure is useful for describing cross-linguistic variation in phonological patterns. But does a hierarchical organization govern the production of speech? In this talk I will describe the Selection-coordination theory of speech production, which holds that articulation is not governed by a fixed hierarchical structure, but rather by flexibly assembled sets of articulatory gestures. The theory holds that selection and coordination mechanisms give rise to two prototypical control regimes: competitive control and coordinative control. Over the course of development, children acquire coordinative control over movements that were previously competitively controlled, this process being mediated by the internalization of sensory feedback. In this framework, segments, moras, and syllables are viewed as differently-sized instantiations of a more general motor planning unit, the organization of control in any given utterance is task/context-specific, and hierarchical structure is the byproduct of a developmental progression. Evidence for the theory is drawn from research in motor control, speech development, and phonological and phonetic patterns.
  • 21st September 2017 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Donka Minkova (UCLA) 'Grenzsignale and phonological reconstruction: some test cases from Old and Middle English'.
  • 15th September 2017 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB [NOTE UNUSUAL DAY - THIS IS A FRIDAY]: James Kirby & Bob Ladd 'Effects of obstruent voicing on vowel F0: implications for laryngeal realism'.
  • 13th September 2017 (12:10-13:00), room 1.17, DSB [NOTE UNUSUAL TIME AND DAY - THIS IS A WEDNESDAY]: Matt Goldrick (Northwestern University) 'Continuous dynamics in speech and phonological cognition'. Abstract: During speech, the positions of the articulators evolve continuously in physical space. In ongoing work, we have proposed that mental representations underlying speech articulation evolve continuously in an abstract symbolic space, organized around the dimensions that define linguistic structure. To support this proposal -- Gradient Symbolic Computation (GSC) -- I will review acoustic phonetic data suggesting multiple planning elements can be co-activated and as a result co-produced in articulation. I will then present preliminary work examining how the dynamics of GSC may provide a novel, non-derivational account of opaque phonological processes.

  • 5th June 2017 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB [NOTE UNUSUAL DAY - THIS IS A MONDAY]: Bronwen Evans (UCL) '"No Mummy, it's a b[ɑː]th not a b[æ]th!" The effects of language background and exposure on the processing of accented speech by monolingual and bilingual'. JOINT MEETING WITH the Language Variation and Change and Developmental Linguistics Research Groups. Abstract: Recent increases in complex international migration patterns have led to increasingly diverse multidialectal and multilingual communities, particularly within large urban centres, such as London. Such complex migration patterns mean that native, monolingual, children are likely to encounter not just different, native regional accents but also foreign-accented speech. Children raised bi- or multilingually within these communities will likely be exposed to still more variability; accented speech in their home language, foreign-accented speech and accented speech in their community language. Being able to deal with accent variation is a fundamental part of developing communicative competence. However, relatively little is known about how children develop the ability to perceive differences between accents and use this knowledge to aid comprehension. Still less is known about how this might be affected by language background. In this talk I will present findings from a recent study that investigated accent processing in monolingual and bilingual children from a diverse accent community in London, and discuss preliminary findings from ongoing work with children growing up in a more homogenous language setting (Hampton, UK). Taken together, the results suggest that differences in early exposure to variation in the language environment lead to differences in the processing of sociolinguistic variation in young children.
  • 18th May 2017 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Jade Jørgen Sandstedt 'Why is there so much disharmony in harmony languages?'
  • 13th April 2017 (12:10-13:00), room 1.17, DSB: Soundess Azzabou-Kacem 'Stress shift in English Rhythm Rule environments: Effects of prosodic boundary strength and stress clash types'. Abstract available here.
  • 9th February 2017 (13:10-14:00), room 1.20, DSB: Pertti Palo (QMU, Edinburgh) 'Patterns of Articulatory Activation in Delayed Naming'. Abstract: During my PhD project I have studied speech initiation with delayed naming experiments mainly recorded with ultrasound tongue imaging (UTI). I have developed methods for automatically analysing the articulatory data from UTI. In my presentation I will give a brief background for the experiments and the automatic analysis methods, followed by results on the timing relationships of acoustic and articulatory onsets. My results repeat the previous finding that the acoustic reaction time is inversely (negatively) correlated with acoustic duration of an onset consonant. I further show that this phenomenon originates in the interval from Articulatory onset to Acoustic onset and provide preliminary analysis on the parts of the tongue responsible for initiating movement in different onset consonant contexts.
  • 8th December 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Siri Gjersøe (University of Leipzig) 'Tone and nominal inflection in Nuer'.
  • 1st December 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Bob Ladd 'Three-way stop voicing contrast in Swiss German'.
  • 24th November 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Bert Remijsen 'Three-level vowel length in Shilluk'.
  • 17th November 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Qian Luo (Michigan State University) 'Consonantal Effects on Pitch in Tonal Languages' [slides available here].
  • 3rd November 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Ben Molineaux 'Phonological and morphological patterns in Mapudungun stress assignment'.
  • 13th October 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Michael Ramsammy 'Sibilant sandhi and hybrid voicing contrast in European Portuguese'.
  • 29th September 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: James Kirby 'Microprosody and tonogenesis'.
  • 30th June 2016: Stephanie Shih (UC Merced) 'Mende tonotactics in surface optimizing multilevel grammar'.
  • 9th June 2016: Myfany Turpin (University of Sydney) 'Syllabic meter in Arandic languages of central Australia'.
  • 2nd June 2016: Tatiana Reid (University of Surrey) 'Nuer morphophonology: the verbal paradigm'.
  • 27th April 2016: Bryan Gick (University of British Columbia) 'Are speech universals hard-wired…in the body?'

  • 21st April 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Patrycja Strycharczuk & Koen Sebregts (QMU & Utrecht University) 'Articulatory dynamics of degemination in Dutch'.
  • 24th March 2016 (16:10-17:00), room 3.11, DSB (note unusual time - there's no Linguistic Circle on this day, so this is scheduled at that time): Jonah Katz (University of West Virginia) 'The function of lenition/fortition patterns: evidence from word segmentation.'
  • 24th March 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: James Kirby 'Obstruent voicing, aspiration, and tone' and Bob Ladd & James Kirby ‘Obstruent effects on fundamental frequency: distinct aspects with distinct explanations’
  • 11th March 2016 (note unusual day - this is a Friday) (13:00-14:00), room 1.17, DSB - a double-header: Martin Kohlberger (Leiden) 'Variation and sound change: nasal vowels in Shiwiar (Chicham, Ecuador)' and Joseph Brooks (UCSB) 'The phonologization of implosive prestopped nasals in Andamang Chini (Papuan)'.
  • 2nd March 2016 (note unusual day - this is a Wednesday) (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Report on Working with Personal and Sensitive Data. A joint event with the Language Variation and Change Research Group.
  • 18th February 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Bert Remijsen 'Phonological and morphophonological investigations on Shilluk - a progress report'.
  • 14th January 2016 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Tina Bögel (Universität Konstanz) 'Pashto second position en(do)clisis and the syntax-prosody interface in LFG'.
  • 3rd December 2015 - no meeting because of the Second Edinburgh Symposium on Historical Phonology (and note also the 'fringe' satellite meeting on 2nd December, on the History of Historical Phonology.)
  • 18th November 2015 (note unusual day - this is a Wednesday)(14:10-15:00 - note unusual time), room 1.17, DSB: Joanna Kopaczyk, Benjamin Molineaux and Vasilis Karaiskos 'How to capture medieval sound-to-spelling correspondences? Database design and technical solutions for FITS'. A joint event with the English Language Research Group.
  • 5th November 2015 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Ida Toivonen (Carleton University) 'The production and perception of intrinsic vowel duration'. [Vowels differ in their intrinsic duration. For example, the vowel in 'bat' is typically longer than the vowel in 'bit'. One relevant factor is vowel height: low vowels are longer than high vowels in English and cross-linguistically (e.g., Heffner 1937, House & Fairbanks 1953, Peterson & Lehiste 1960, Fischer-Jørgensen 1940, Abramson 1962). This talk revisits the correlation between vowel height and duration and tries to understand the reasons behind it. The traditional explanation for the positive correlation between height and duration appeals to physiology: low vowels take longer to produce because of the extra time it takes for the jaw to open (e.g., Lehiste 1970), or because the jaw position of high vowels is close to the jaw position held during the production of most consonants (Catford 1977). An alternative explanation is that each vowel has a phonologized duration target (e.g., Solé & Ohala 2010). If the duration of vowels depends directly on how much the jaw moves, we would expect a positive correlation within categories as well as between categories: multiple tokens of the same vowel would be expected to display a correlation similar to the correlation between vowels; i.e., a slightly lower pronunciation of a given vowel should be slightly longer. We investigate the vowel duration and height between and within categories in English and Swedish, using F1 as a measure of vowel height. The between-category investigation confirms previous studies: high vowels are shorter than low vowels. However, we did not find the same correlation within categories: a higher instance of the vowel in 'bit' is not shorter than a lower instance of 'bit'. If the positive correlation between height and duration cannot be directly explained by an appeal to physiology, we are left with the following question: Why is the generalization so robust cross-linguistically? In fact, it seems to be universal. We present a series of perception studies where participants were presented with minimal pairs differing in the height of the vowel (Stone 2015). The results indicate that speakers perceive low vowels as shorter than high vowels even when the vowels have been manipulated to have the same duration.]
  • 29th October 2015 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: George Starling. 'Perceptual learning of American English vowels from infant-directed speech' [Infants identify the phonetic categories present in the linguistic input that they receive within their first year of life. Current approaches to perceptual learning favour statistical learning as the mechanism behind this learning task. In this talk, I will review previous theoretical approaches to categorisation and discuss the current findings of my own acoustic analysis and statistical models. The vowel system of American English presents an ideal case study since it consists of a large set of phonetic categories that overlap in acoustic space. Previous statistical approaches to this task have failed to recover an appropriate category structure through bottom-up statistics alone. By analysing a large corpus of infant- and adult-directed speech, I aim to describe the acoustic properties of the vowels in caregivers' speech and assess the extent to which model learners can recover its underlying category structure.] A joint event with the Developmental Linguistics Research Group.
  • 1st October 2015 (13:10-14:00), room B21 in 7 George Square: Joe Fruehwald 'Using Functional Data Analysis to study changes if vowel trajectories'.

  • 3rd August 2015 (note unusual day - this is a Monday) (13:10-15:00), room 1.17, DSB: ICPhS 2015 practice presentations (Zac Boyd, Daniel Lawrence, James Kirby, Misnadin)
  • 8th June 2015 note unusual day - this is a Monday (13:10-14:00), room 1.20, DSB: Adam Ussishkin (University of Arizona) 'Maltese root priming is morphological, not phonological'.
  • 14th May 2015 (13:10-14:00), room 1.20, DSB: Laura Arnold 'Lexical tone in Ambel'. [Ambel is an Austronesian language spoken by around 1000 people on the island of Waigeo, in West Papua province, Indonesia. In this presentation I will use unpublished primary data to demonstrate that Ambel can be analysed as having tone. Lexical tone in Austronesian languages is very uncommon: of some 1200 Austronesian languages, Ambel is only the nineteenth to have been analysed as a tone language. I will use data from mono- and polysyllabic words in various contexts to show that there are two contrastive, non-predictable pitch patterns in Ambel - [H] and [LH]. I shall then use these phonetic data to explore possible analyses of the phonological system. Issues covered will include whether the domain of tonal specification is the syllable or the word, and whether the two-way surface contrast arises from a system which is underlyingly equipollent (/H/ vs /L/, or /H/ vs /LH/) or privative (/H/ vs /Ø/). Finally, I will locate the Ambel tonal system in a wider typological context.]
  • 30th April 2015 (13:10-15:00), room 3.11, DSB: Post-Graduate Session: Merel Maslowski 'Differentiating between production-driven and perception-driven frequency effects in nonce homophones' and Udita Sawhney 'The tone system in Dogri, an Indo-Aryan language'.
  • 2nd April 2015 (13:10-14:00), room 1.20, DSB: Joe Pater (UMass Amherst) 'Violable constraints in classical universalist phonology and beyond'. [Since the advent of OT in the mid nineties, the empirical scope and theoretical goals of the field of phonology have changed quite dramatically. In what we might call “Classical Universalist Phonology” (CUP) which started with the principles and parameters work of the early eighties, phonologists construct analyses of individual languages, and aim for theories of phonological grammar that generate all and only the possible systems that are inferred from this analytic work. OT as it was originally proposed is firmly in this tradition. CUP continues to be fruitfully practised in much of the current work in OT and its violable constraint relatives, Harmonic Grammar and Harmonic Serialism, as well as in other phonological frameworks. Increasingly, however, phonologists are working with data from corpora and experiments, which often provide information about the structure of phonological systems that cannot be obtained through traditional elicitation and judgment work. The explicit modeling of learning has also taken a much more central place in phonological theory, and typological generalizations are increasingly seen as emerging from the interaction of phonetics, learning and the properties of phonological grammar, rather than being derivable directly from the grammar itself. I’ll point out some ways in which violable constraints are useful in research that goes beyond CUP, which suggest to me that the shelf-life of OT, broadly construed, will be quite long for phonology, also broadly construed. I’ll also include some reminders of ways that violable constraints are useful in CUP.]
  • 5th March 2015 (13:10-14:00), room 1.20, DSB: David Lorenz (Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg) and David Tizón-Couto (Universidade de Vigo) 'Speech rate and phonological environment as determinants of reduction: 'havda' and 'uzda' in spoken American English'. [Usage-based approaches to language generally assume that frequent sequences are 'chunked' and accessed non-compositionally (i.a. Bybee 2010, Langacker 2000). In spoken language, this may show in realizations that disregard the morphological components of a composite structure. We investigate this in the case of V-to-Vinf constructions in American English. Using data from the SBC (DuBois et al. 2000-2005), we examine the effects of speech rate and phonological environment on the realization of two types of the structure V to Vinf in American English: 'have to' and 'used to'. These items may undergo to-contraction (Aoun & Lightfoot 1984, Pullum 1997, Krug 2000), but the contractions are not conventionalized (unlike e.g. 'gonna'). Contraction, here defined as a reduction of the /t/-sound (flap or elision), is assumed to require non-compositionality. Speech rate is measured in syllables per second on the intonation unit; item frequencies are extracted from COCA (Davies 2008-). Across types, to-contraction is shown to be contingent on rapid speech; phonological context (specifically the following sound) affects only the final vowel (often realized as schwa). Moreover, contracted realizations of have to and used to are far less frequent than conventionalized contractions ('wanna', 'gonna'). These results suggest that 'havda' and 'uzda' are on-line reductions of non-compositional chunks, and that rapid speech potentially fosters the propagation of contracted variants.]
  • 5th February 2015 (12:10-14:00 - note unusual time), room B21 in 7 George Square (note unusual place): Bert Remijsen 'Combining qualitative and quantitative approaches in the study of tone'. [This is a dry run for a masterclass at the 4th International Conference on Language Documentation & Conservation (University of Hawai'i at Manoa, February 26-March 1, 2015). Ear-based methods and quantitative analysis are both very useful in the study of tone. In order to combine them, one needs to understand how the auditory perception of pitch relates to the fundamental frequency pattern that gives rise to it. Crucial to this relation is the notion of tonal alignment. In this master class, I will explore this notion from phonetic and phonological angles, point out key findings in the experimental and typological literature, and illustrate the issues with many sound examples.]
  • 22nd January 2015 (13:10-14:00), room 1.20, DSB: Benjamin Molineaux 'Prosodic structure and the fate of early English prefixes'. [English is unique among its nearest relatives in having lost most – but not all – of its native prefixes. This change took place in the transition between the language’s old and middle periods, and is traditionally chalked up to 'wholesale borrowing' from Norman French, 'which meant an enormous cut-down on the traditional patterns of word-formation' (Marchand, 1969:131). Closer inspection shows the causality and chronology of this argument to be untenable. Other accounts of the change come from semantics (Samuels 1972; Brinton 1989; Kastovsky 1992), syntax (Hiltunen 1983; Elenbaas 2007) and phonology (Lutz 1997), as well as from grammaticalisation-inspired theories (Hopper & Traugott 2003; Los et al. 2012). Thus far, however, such work has been restricted to explaining loss of either separable or inseparable verbal prefixes, while ignoring the simultaneous decay of nominal and adjectival ones. In this talk I will attempt a principled explanation of the conditions leading to early English prefix loss and preservation across word categories. I will use corpus data to assess the extent of the decline between the two periods, going on to propose syllable weight, foot structure, and the ability to constitute independent prosodic words as factors determining prefix preservation and loss. Finally, the growth of a constraint banning heavy monosyllabic prefixes in Early Middle English will be argued for. Constituting canonical feet and prosodic words, such prefixes would have borne a degree of stress, which clashed with adjacent root-initial stress. As a result, heavy monosyllabic prefixes (tō-, and-, up-, wið-) were either lost or lexicalized.]
  • 28th August 2014 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Misnadin 'Temporal and spectral properties of the three-way laryngeal contrast of Madurese'.
  • 9th October 2014 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Mits Ota in collaboration with Barbora Skarabela 'The phonology of baby-talk words'. [In most speech communities, there is a set of register-specific words used in addressing infants and young children (Ferguson, 1964, 1977, 1978). These typically take the form of lexical replacement such as 'choo-choo' (for train), and modification such as 'doggie' (for dog). It has long been recognized that these lexical items (?baby-talk words?) exhibit common form characteristics including the prevalence of reduplication, recurrent endings (e.g., -/i/ in English), lack of consonant clusters (cf. stomach vs. tummy), and favored prosodic structures (e.g., 'CVCV in English, CVG.GV in Arabic). However, little is understood about why baby-talk words exist at all or why they tend to have similar phonological patterns across languages. While traditional accounts focus on the resemblance between the observed common phonological structures and children's early vocalization or word production, recent findings in developmental research suggest another possibility; that is, the form characteristics in baby-talk words reflect perceptual or learning biases in infants' speech and language processing. For example, word forms containing adjacent repetition of syllables (e.g., mubaba) tend to attract the attention in young infants (Gervain et al., 2008; Gervain, Berent, & Werker, 2012) and word forms with uniform endings are easier to detect/learn (Kempe, Brooks, & Gillis, 2005; Kempe et al., 2007). In this talk, we present some preliminary outcomes of a series of experiments and analyses we have been conducting to test the hypothesis that phonological structures typical of baby-talk words facilitate word segmentation and word learning.]
  • 23rd October 2014 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Alice Turk in collaboration with Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel (MIT) 'A sketch of an extrinsic timing model of speech production'.
  • 27th November 2014 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Pavel Iosad 'Bottom-up phonologization of redundant features: vowel quality in south-west Welsh'. A joint event with the Celtic Linguistics Reading Group. [I present the results of a study of the phonologization of vowel quality in south-western dialects of Welsh as an example of bottom-up creation of phonological categories on the basis of predictable categorical distributions. Across Welsh dialects, the quality of (non-low) vowels in stressed syllables is closely intertwined with their length: generally, long stressed vowels are 'tense' while short stressed vowels are 'lax'. In contrastivist frameworks, the mutual predictability of length and quality forces analysts to choose one 'distinctive' feature. South-West Welsh varieties are described as deviating from this picture in allowing 'lax' long mid vowels before high vowels in a following syllable. This is a potential problem for a quantity-based contrastivist approach to Welsh vowels, such as the one in Iosad (2012). It is, however, conceivable that the pattern is not categorical but is instead a continuous trade-off in inherent vowel length. I present the results of a study of vowel quality in South Welsh. The study shows the existence of several types of quantity-quality interactions, including the one described for south-western dialects. I propose a bottom-up phonologization scenario based on learners picking up predictable distributions in the data. This analysis is supported by the patterning of exceptions and by the existence of a 'rule scattering' phenomenon.]
  • 11th December 2014 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Amanda Cardoso and Patrick Honeybone 'Palatalisation can be quantity-sensitive: Dorsal Fricative Assimilation in Liverpool English'. A joint event with the English Language Research Group.

  • 19th September 2013 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Martin Corley 'Analysing ultrasound articulation data in multiple-participant experiments'.
  • 10th October 2013 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: P-group business meeting.
  • Wednesday 16th October 2013 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Nigel Fabb (Strathclyde) 'Prosodic phrasing and the delivery of poetry' [note the unusual day: Wednesday, not Thursday].
  • 24th October 2013 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Andras Cser (PPKE, Hungary)'The split place node hypothesis: evidence from Latin'. [This talk discusses the hypothesis, going back to the early 1990’s and couched in different models in different ways since then, that in feature geometry the place features of consonants and the place features of vowels occupy different slots and/or are dominated by different higher-level nodes. Analyses of a number of phenomena from Latin are adduced in support of such a model, e.g. assimilations between consonants and vowels, the behaviour and diachronic development of gn-initial stems and the allomorphy displayed by the prefixcon-.]
  • NB: Andras Cser will also be giving two special seminars open to students and staff - details below.
  • 14th November 2013 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Rosey Billington (University of Melbourne) 'The sound system of Lopit'. [Ths talk will provide an overview of the sound system of Lopit, an un(der)described Eastern Nilotic language traditionally spoken in South Sudan. Following a description of the segmental and tonal phonology, I turn to the phonological and phonetic evidence for an 'advanced tongue root' type contrast among Lopit vowels, presenting experimental results of investigations into some of their acoustic and durational properties. Results show good evidence for such a contrast, but also indicate that a number of different cues are involved, and speakers may use these to different extents.]
  • 5th December 2013 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Natalia Zharkova (QMU) 'Articulatory constraints in child speech: ultrasound tongue imaging and acoustic evidence'.
  • 13th February 2014 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: Bert Remijsen 'Evidence for contrastive tonal alignment in Shilluk'. [Many studies hypothesize or assume that tonal alignment is not contrastive in contour tones (e.g. Hyman 1988, Odden 1995, Silverman 1997, Yip 2002). However, in a recent study on Dinka, a Western Nilotic language of South Sudan, I have presented evidence of precisely this type of configuration for falling contours, i.e., of an Early-aligned Fall being in contrast with a Late-aligned Fall (Remijsen 2013). In Dinka, the Low and the Early-aligned Fall are contextually conditioned allophones of the same phonological category. On the hypothesis that tonal alignment is contrastive in contour tones, it should be equally possible for a human language to present a contrast of Low vs. Early-aligned Fall vs. Late-aligned Fall vs. High. The realisation of such a contrast would involve the same configuration of fundamental frequency, time-shifted relative to the syllable to produce four patterns. In this talk I will present evidence of this configuration in Shilluk, another Western Nilotic language.]
  • 20th February 2014 (12:10-13:00), room 1.20, DSB: Martin Kraemer (Tromso) 'An amphichronic look at palatalization and gliding in Italian'. NOTE UNUSUAL TIME AND PLACE.
  • 20th March 2014 (13:10-14:00), room 1.17, DSB: James Kirby 'Gestural coordination in Khmer word-initial clusters'.
  • 17th April 2014 (13:10-14:30), room 1.17, DSB: Postgraduate session: Daniel Lawrence 'How much do listeners know about phonetic variation? Investigating socio-indexical knowledge through web-based experiments'; Misnadin 'Temporal and spectral characteristics of the three-way laryngeal contrast in Madurese'; and George Starling'Perceptual learning of vowel length categories in Japanese'.
  • 1st May 2014 (13.10-14.00), room 1.17, DSB: Bob Ladd 'Quasi-contrastive phonetic categories'. Dry run of a talk to be presented at ISSP 10 (10th International Seminar of Speech Production) in Cologne the following week - feedback needed!
  • 26th May 2014 (13.10-14.00): Rory Turnbull (Ohio State) 'Individual differences in phonetic reduction and audience design'.

  • 18 Jul 2013 Speaker: Marton Soskuthy (University of Edinburgh) Topic: Phonetic biases and systemic effects in the actuation of sound change (pre-viva talk).
  • 20 May 2013 Speaker: Sam Bowman (Stanford University) Topic: Two arguments for vowel harmony by trigger competition
  • 02 May 2013 Postgraduate Student Presentations
  • 22 Mar 2013 Speaker: Nikolaus Ritt (University of Vienna) Topic: The morphonotactics of word final consonant clusters in and after the Middle English period
  • 14 Mar 2013 Speakers: Alice Turk & Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel Topic: What is speech rhythm? A Commentary.
  • 27 Feb 2013 Speaker: Amanda Cardoso (University of Edinburgh) Topic: PRICE and MOUTH Variation in Scouse
  • 07 Feb 2013 Speaker: Margaret (Peggy) Renwick (University of Oxford) Topic: Unpredicted Assimilations in UK English: Initial results from the Audio BNC
  • 22 Nov 2012 Speaker: Amanda Cardoso (University of Edinburgh) Topic: Pre-velar raising in Western Canadian Dialects
  • 08 Nov 2012 Speakers: Bert Remijsen (University of Edinburgh) Topic: About contrastive tonal alignment and how to represent it
  • 16 Oct 2012 Speakers: Danielle Turton (University of Manchester) and Michael Ramsammy (University of Edinburgh) Topic: Unstressed vowel lowering in Mancunian English: a socio-phonological study

  • 19 Apr 2012 Speaker: Tareq Maiteq (University of Edinburgh) Topic: Prosodic constituency structure and the spread of anticipatory pharyngealisation
  • 12 Apr 2012 Speakers: Peter Racz (Universität Freiburg), Marton Soskuthy (University of Edinburgh) & Daniel Szeredi (New York University) Topic: A phonetic study of L-deletion in Hungarian
  • 08 Mar 2012 Speaker: Péter Rácz (Universität Freiburg) Topic: Salience in sociophonetics - a case study of Hungarian hiatus resolution
  • 23 Feb 2012 Speakers: Rebecca Schaefer, IMHSD (Reid School of Music, University of Edinburgh) Topic: Perception and imagination of melodies in EEG: a closer look at rhythmic processes
  • 24 Nov 2011 Speaker: Alice Turk (University of Edinburgh) Topic: How is speech timing controlled? Part II: Articulatory Phonology & Task Dynamics
  • 10 Nov 2011 Speaker: John Esling (University of Victoria) Topic: Infants acquire the speech sound production mechanism from day one - beginning in the pharynx
  • 3 Nov 2011 Speaker: Alice Turk (University of Edinburgh) Topic: How is speech timing controlled? Part I: Articulatory Phonology & Task Dynamics
  • 27 Oct 2011 Speaker: Stefan Frisch (University of South Florida, Fulbright-Cardiff University post-doctoral scholar) Topic: Influences on well-formedness judgments for novel nonwords
  • 20 Oct 2011 Speaker: Andrew Wedel Topic: Words influence the evolution of sound category contrast: Evidence from simulation, corpus and laboratory studies

  • 23 Jun 2011 Speaker: Bert Remijsen  Topic: The effects of contrast maintenance and time pressure on the alignment of a rightward shifted high tone target in Dinka
  • 16 Jun 2011 Speakers: Anthony Buhr and Robin Lickley Topic: Articulatory movement at cutoff: In search of hidden error
  • 26 May 2011 Speaker: Natalia Zharkova (Queen Margaret University) Topic: Tongue dynamics and speech motor control in preadolescents
  • 16 May 2011 Speaker: Stephanie Shih (Stanford University) Topic: On the nature of end weight in spoken English construction choice
  • 07 Apr 2011 Speaker: Jennifer Nycz Topic: Changing dialects, changing representations? Testing phonological theory with second dialect data
  • 11 Mar 2011 Speaker: John J. Ohala Topic: The connection between [ATR] and voicing in obstruents
  • 9 Mar 2011 Speaker: John J. Ohala Topic: Ethological factors shaping human language
  • 24 Feb 2011 Speaker: Tamara Rathcke Topic: On the neutralising status of truncation in intonation
  • 17 Feb 2011 Speaker: José Hualde Topic: Intervocalic lenition
  • 13 Jan 2011 Speaker: Akira Utsugi Topic: The perception of non-native lexical pitch accent by speakers of 'accentless' Japanese dialects

  • 23rd October 2013 (14:10-16:00), room 3.10 then 3.11, DSB: Andras Cser (PPKE, Hungary) Issues in the phonological description of dead languages: case studies from Latin. [This talk discusses some preliminary methodological issues of the phonological and phonetic description of dead languages. Then case studies are presented from Latin that exemplify some interesting points either in terms of data or in terms of phonological interpretation. Depending on time, the case studies will include lateral dissimilation, variable assimilation at morpheme boundaries, contour segments vs. clusters and sequences (labiovelars, diphthongs), extrasyllabicity and resyllabification.]
  • 25th October 2013 (15:10-17:00), room 1.17, DSB: Andras Cser (PPKE, Hungary)Phonology and morphology in the nineteenth century: the issue of abstractness vs. empiricism [This talk discusses the changing roles of phonology and morphology throughout the nineteenth century and the way the focus shifted from the latter to the former beginning with the 1870’s, one of the most remarkable periods in the development of modern linguistics. This shift was a very important aspect of the Paleogrammarian-Neogrammarian transition, an aspect that has not so far got the attention it deserves. It is also closely connected to the role abstraction played in the work of the different generations of linguists. The open conflict between the Paleogrammarians and the Neogrammarians as well as the latent conflict between the Neogrammarians and de Saussure was partly grounded in different perceptions of what constituted unwarranted abstraction, an issue that is still very much with us in linguistics.]
  • Martin Kraemer will be giving a short special course on Underlying Representations in Phonology open to all students and staff. There are two sessions on this: Monday 17th February (13.10-15.00) and Wednesday 19th February (13.10-15.00), both in room 1.17. All are welcome to turn up to these sessions - no booking necessary.

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