Ryan Bennett invited alumni speaker at UC Santa Cruz LASC 2016

March 5, 2016

Assistant Professor Ryan Bennett presented the Distinguished Alumnus Lecture at Linguistics at Santa Cruz 2016 on Saturday, March 5. The annual LASC conference showcases the research of current Santa Cruz linguistics students, and features a Santa Cruz PhD alum as an invited speaker. Ryan’s talk, titled “Stop contrasts in Kaqchikel: production, perception, and the lexicon,” is based on joint work with Kevin Tang and Juan Ajsivinac. Here is the abstract for the talk:

Much recent research in phonetics and laboratory phonology has drawn on large spoken and written corpora for sources of naturalistic data. However, corpus-based phonetics and phonology is limited by the fact that large corpora are typically available only for a handful of majority languages. In this talk we take on the task of developing spoken and written corpora for Kaqchikel, a Guatemalan Mayan language. Our empirical focus is the inventory of stop consonants: How do the ejectives and implosives of Kaqchikel fit into phonetic typology? How are the acoustic properties of stops reflected in their relative perceptibility? And how do lexical factors (like functional load) impinge on real-time perception?

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