Phonetics

Dongmei Rao and Jason Shaw Publish Papers in Journal of Phonetics, Data in Brief

Dongmei Rao, former visiting scholar (19-20), and Jason Shaw published a paper entitled “The role of gestural timing in non-coronal fricative mergers in Southwestern Mandarin: Acoustic evidence from a dialect island”. The paper reports new phonetic data linking synchronic variation in the production of velar and labiodental fricatives to patterns of diachronic merger of these sounds found across Southwestern Mandarin varieties.

Jason Shaw gave an invited talk at LMU Munich

Jason Shaw gave an invited talk at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich. The talk, entitled “Tone as gesture: space, time, perception and change” featured recent work in the Yale phonetics lab on lexical tone, including graduate student projects by Chris Geissler and Andy Zhang. The talk was a part of LMU’s MAMPF (Methods and approaches of modern phonetic research) series (link to talk series). Link to abstract.

Jason Shaw publishes in Language

Jason Shaw co-authored a paper published in Language. The paper, entitled “Phonological contrast and phonetic variation: The case of velars in Iwaidja”, presents a field-based ultrasound and acoustic study of Iwaidja, an endanged Australian Aboriginal language. This study reveals how lenition that is both phonetically gradient and variable across speakers and words can give the illusion of a contextually restricted phonemic contrast.

Several Yale linguists present at AMP 2020

Several phonologists are presenting at the Annual Meeting on Phonology (AMP) 2020.

Jason Shaw is presenting a paper co-authored with Sejin Oh (Yale-affiliated, at Haskins), Alexei Kochetov & Karthik Durvasula: “Distinguishing complex segments from consonant clusters using gestural coordination

There are also three posters:

Sarah Babinski: “Intrinsic f0 and sound change: Evidence from Australian languages”,

Jason Shaw published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Jason Shaw co-authored a paper in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America entitled “Effects of vowel coproduction on the timecourse of tone recognition”. The paper uses eye-tracking to assess whether vowel quality influences the perception of lexical tone in Mandarin Chinese. Although vowels and tones had been thought to be largely independent, recent work shows that tones have a small but consistent effect on the production of vowels (Shaw et al. 2016). This paper shows the perceptual relevance of that variation.

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