28th February 2024 12:20 PM

PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group

Sam & Jeremy will discuss statistical model evaluation & will demonstrate various ideas using RStudio and a dataset of penguin anatomy measurements.

4th March 2024 12:20 PM

Phonetics Lab Meeting

Annabelle will lead a discussion of this paper:

What it means to be phonetic or phonological : The case of Romanian devoiced nasals - by Benjamin V. Tucker and Natasha Warner, Phonology 27 (2010) 289-324

Abstract

Abstract phonological patterns and detailed phonetic patterns can combine to produce unusual acoustic results, but criteria for what aspects of a pattern are phonetic and what aspects are phonological are often disputed. Early literature on Romanian makes mention of nasal devoicing in word-final clusters (e. g. in /basm/ 'fairy-tale').

Using acoustic, aerodynamic and ultrasound data, the current work investigates how syllable structure, prosodie boundaries, phonetic paradigm uniformity and assimilation influence Romanian nasal devoicing. It provides instrumental phonetic documentation of devoiced nasals, a phenomenon that has not been widely studied experimentally, in a phonetically underdocumented language.

We argue that sound patterns should not be separated into phonetics and phonology as two distinct systems, but neither should they all be grouped together as a single, undifferentiated system. Instead, we argue for viewing the distinction between phonetics and phonology as a largely continuous multidimensional space, within which sound patterns, including Romanian nasal devoicing, fall.

6th March 2024 12:20 PM

PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group

We'll watch this video by Dr. Jean-Luc Duomont titled:   Creating effective slides: Design, Construction, and Use in Science. This video will help you design presentations that listeners will understand and remember.

Dr. Duomont is an expert in the art of effective scientific communication, and through his company Principiae  he regularly consults with companies and universities to improve research communication skills.

7th March 2024 04:30 PM

Linguistics Colloquium Speaker Dr.Matthew Faytak to speak on Piaroa nasal harmony aerodynamics

The Cornell Linguistics Department proudly presents Linguistics Colloquium Speaker Dr. Matthew Faytak, Assistant Professor at the University of Buffalo.  Dr. Faytak will give a talk titled: The aerodynamics of nasal harmony in Piaroa

 A light reception with the speaker will follow in the Linguistics Lounge.  Please contact the Linguistics Department lingdept@cornell.edu at least 72 hours in advance of the event for any special arrangements you may require in order to attend this event.

Abstract:  

The phonetics of nasality have mainly been studied in a convenience sample of languages in the Global North that exhibit binary nasal contrasts.The study of nasal phenomena in Amazonian languages is a crucial counterweight to this bias, but has been hampered by its reliance on impressionistic transcriptions of various analysts, which often disagree substantially in their details. In particular, our understanding of two phenomena, long-distance nasal harmony and subphonemic differences in timing of velum gestures in nasal(ized) segments, is undermined by ambiguities and variation present in much existing descriptive work.

This talk is part of a larger NSF-funded collaborative project on phonetics and phonological typology of nasality in lowland Amazonian languages, the major goal of which is to replace impressionistic generalizations about nasal phenomena with instrumental observations. To this end, a team of experienced field linguists has collected aerodynamic data (nasal and oral airflow) with speakers of twelve languages from several Amazonian language families. After an overview of project sites, collaborators, and cross-site methods, I turn to ongoing analysis of a data set collected by Jorge Rosés Labrada on Piaroa (ISO 639-3 [pid], Sáliban) with 10 speakers from the community of Babel (Amazonas State, Venezuela). Piaroa is thought to have long-distance nasal harmony, but prior analyses fail to reach any consensus on how far nasality spreads leftward from a nasal vowel trigger; whether voiceless consonants block harmony; and whether voiceless consonants are transparent or undergo nasalization to some limited extent.

I discuss three of the group’s findings on Piaroa:

1) nasality spreads right to left from the trigger to the word edge, but diminishes in magnitude further from the trigger.

2) No consonants appear to block spread of nasalization from the trigger vowel.

3) Within nasal spans, voiceless consonants show increased nasal airflow in nasal harmony conditions, indicating partial nasalization at the start of the closure period. In other words, all Piaroa consonants appear to be at least partial undergoers of nasal harmony.

I suggest an account for (1-3) based on co-activation of conflicting velum gestures for the harmony span and individual consonants, and compare selected findings with data on two other project languages, Panãra (collected by Myriam Lapierre) and Maihɨk̃ i (collected by Lev Michael).

Bio:

Dr. Faytak is  phonetician who specializes in articulatory phonetics, especially tongue ultrasound imaging. The theoretical focus of his research is on the connections between low-level biases in speech production and phonetic and phonological structure. He places a high priority on phonetic description and field data collection, particularly languages of Cameroon and China.

He received my PhD in Linguistics in 2018 from UC Berkeley, where his dissertation concerns within-speaker uniformity of articulatory strategies for fricative consonants and a subset of the vowels in Suzhou 苏州 Chinese.

Currently, he is an Assistant Professor in the University at Buffalo's Department of Linguistics. Most recently before this, he was a postdoctoral research fellow and lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA.