Phonetics

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 co-authored a paper with Kevin Tang, former Yale post-doc, in Cognition. The paper entitled, “Prosody leaks into the memories of words”, demonstrates how the prosodic context in which a word is typically produced can have long-term influences on how it is produced in other contexts.

Sigríður Sæunn Sigurðardóttir has published a paper on some work she has done here. The paper appears in a special issue of Nordlyd that features papers from the 34th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop (CGSW 34) that was held at the University of Konstanz in 2019.

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.

Starting in 2021, Yale will co-sponsor two meetings of the African Linguistics School (ALS, link to ALS website), an organization focused on training young African linguists in theoretical linguistics, on the basis of the large number of languages spoken in Africa.

Jason Shaw published a paper with Weirong Chen of Haskins Laboratories in the Language Sciences section of Frontiers in Psychology. The paper, entitled “Spatially Conditioned Speech Timing: Evidence and Implications”, is part of the Frontiers research topic “Models and Theories of Speech Production”.

Many students, faculty, and alumni of Yale linguistics, as well as colleagues from nearby Haskins Laboratories, presented their work at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this month. They contributed at least 14 talks and posters to the conference and enjoyed a full week of presentations about phonetics, connecting with colleagues and friends from all over the world. 

Graduate students Sarah Babinski and Muye (Andy) Zhang have won IPA Student Awards for their submissions to the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences 2019, which takes place in Melbourne, Australia from August 5-9.  The 49 awards granted for this Congress are awards by the International Phonetic Association for the submitted conference papers based on reviews, of 368 student submissions, by the IPA Committee on Conference Sponsorships and Student Awards.   

Members of the Pama-Nyungan lab recently published a write-up of their results on forced alignment algorithms. Their paper on “A Robin Hood approach to forced alignment: English-trained algorithms and their use on Australian languages” was recently published in the proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. They show that for some purposes, English-trained models can be used without crucial loss of accuracy.

Jason has published an article in the Association for Laboratory Phonology’s journal and presented a talk at its annual meeting.

Jason Shaw, Chris Geissler, and Samuel Andersson spoke about various topics in phonetics and phonology at the Manchester Phonology Meeting.

Chris Geissler and Kevin Zhang joined nine collaborators from Yale and other institutions to study a gene that may influence the way we perceive consonants.

Graduate students Sarah Babinski and Samuel Andersson and PhD candidate Chris Geissler discussed the relationship between phonology and phonetics.

The paper investigates the effect of predictability on vowel duration in Japanese.