6th October 2025 12:20 PM

PhonDAWG - Phonetics Lab Data Analysis Working Group

John Starr presents work-in-progress on learning phonotactics from child-directed speech.

8th October 2025 12:20 PM

Phonetics Lab Meeting

We will discuss this paper by Mark Tiede et. al:  Production Allophones of North American English Liquids, where tongue data was collected by both MRI and Ultrasonic imaging.

Abstract:

The syllabic liquids [ɚ]  (as  in  “purr”) and [əɫ] (as  in “pull”) have  well-defined  acoustic  targets  but  are  produced  with  a wide  range  of  heterogenous  tongue  postures.  

This  work surveys  midsagittal  tongue  shapes  from  a  large  (N=78) number of speakers producing these sounds, to illustrate their variety, and to determine  systematically how this variety can be quantified.

 In particular we propose that a  categorization based  on  just  two  parameters––degree  of  tongue  dorsum convexity  and  tip  orientation––is  sufficient  to  classify observed shapes, and superior to defining ad hoc prototypes. 

9th October 2025 08:00 AM

Dr. Mark Tiede to conduct a hands-on Ultrasonic Imaging workshop

Dr. Mark Tiede (Yale School of Medicine) will visit the Phonetics Lab to conduct a hands-on two-day Ultrasonic Imaging workshop.

AGENDA

Thursday in Ultrasound Lab:

*10:00AM - Review of basic scan parameters (depth of field, sector angle, focus, frequency, etc.); useful to see how these interact with frame rate and image quality and the constraints imposed by hyoid and mandibular shadowing

*11:00AM - Tracking probe and head position: motivation (for subsequent alignment of images or contours to palatal structure), methods (EMA, OptiTrack, video), post-processing approaches

*1:45PM - First Ultrasound Pilot Experiment

*2:45PM - Second Ultrasound Pilot Experiment

Friday in B11:

*11:10 AM - Probe stabilization: tradeoffs between too much and too little constraint on jaw displacement; practical concerns using Wei-rong’s ALPHUS (angle adjustment, minimizing contact with throat, etc)

*1:00PM - Co-collection of US with intraoral EMA: leveraging this to determine transvelar ‘virtual’ sensors, procedures for establishing a common coordinate system

*2:00 - Transverse imaging of the larynx: of interest for observing the ab/adductory cycle in devoicing gestures

*3:00 - Third Ultrasound Pilot Experiment

9th October 2025 04:30 PM

Colloquium Talk Series - Dominique Branson

The Cornell Linguistics Department is proud to present  Dr. Dominique Branson, Soros Justice Fellow with The Open Society Foundations, Adjunct Assistant Professor at Point Park University, and former Visiting Lecturer at The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). 

Dr. Branson will give a talk titled:  "Why Language Matters for Justice: Using Linguistics to Transform the Legal System".

Abstract:

The murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the global protests that followed, reinvigorated conversations about systemic racism and reminded us that race continues to shape every facet of the U.S. legal system.

While these conversations often focus on policing and sentencing, language itself also plays a central role in producing and perpetuating inequality. In this talk, Dominique Branson (Cornell ’14) reflects on her journey from undergraduate student in Cornell’s Linguistics Department to postdoctoral scholar working at the intersection of language and criminal legal reform.

She earned her PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2023 and has since applied her training as an expert witness in criminal cases in both the U.S. and the U.K. Drawing from this experience, Branson shows that analyzing language used in routine legal procedures reveals how individual encounters map onto systemic racial inequities.

She also demonstrates how Black Americans’ language practices are misinterpreted in courts in ways that align with prevailing stereotypes about criminality, further entrenching harmful associations between race and crime.

Most recently, as a Soros Justice Fellow with the Open Society Foundations, she used linguistic methods to highlight the importance of equitable language practices in legal proceedings to promote more fair outcomes during the pretrial phase, where many racial disparities first emerge in the process.

In sharing her experiences across multiple stages of her career, she highlights the value of both traditional qualitative approaches—such as discourse and conversation analysis—and computational methods for analyzing language in legal contexts.

More broadly, she argues that applying linguistic theory and methodology not only advances the discipline’s scholarship but also enables linguists to enact meaningful social change.

Speaker Bio:

Soros Justice Fellowship. As a Soros Justice Fellow, I conduct research to document and destabilize anti-Black ideologies that legitimize pretrial dangerous predictions and harm Black communities. My aim is to abolish anti-Black pretrial practices that contribute to racial disparities in pretrial detainment and also reify the notion that Black Americans and their communities are “dangerous.” I accomplish this by considering how courtroom discourse practices reify anti-Black ideologies about Black “dangerousness.”

Teaching. At Point Park, I teach two courses in the Literature, Culture, and Society department: Introduction to Linguistics and Language and Justice. At UIC, I taught two courses in the Criminology, Law, and Justice department: Courts in Society and Language and Justice. In these courses, I inspire students to think critically about what justice is, and to think creatively about how to pursue justice using language.

Research. My research examines the relationship between Blackness, linguistic perception, language policy, and racial disparities in the criminal legal and education systems as well as in broader society. I merge disciplinary boundaries to interrogate and destabilize language ideologies and hegemonic listening practices that legitimize anti-Blackness in US institutions. For example, I have used (socio)linguistic knowledge to illuminate how linguistic practices in schools criminalize and adultify Black girls and to examine whether and to what extent listeners associate “Black-sounding” voices with criminality.

Dissertation. I completed my dissertation called, Sounding Guilty: Criminality and Black Racialized Speech” in 2023 at the University of Pittsburgh (Linguistics Department). In it, I used methods across several social science, humanistic, and critical disciplines to illuminate a link between listeners’ ideas of what it means to “sound Black” and “sound like a criminal.”