PhD Candidate Sarah Babinski presented a talk titled “Lexical stress: Phonetic variation under phonological stability in Australian languages,” at LabPhon17, the biennial conference of the Association for Laboratory Phonology, which was held virtually from July 6-8 2020. In this talk, she presented preliminary results from her dissertation research on the comparative phonetics of stress marking across Australian languages.
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.
The Yale linguistics department is well-represented at the coming Annual Meeting of the LSA, January 2-5, 2020 in New Orleans. But apart from the many current members of the department who will be attending, we are also hoping to connect with previous department members. A meet-up will be organized, with more information below:
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”.
A group of Yale linguists traveled to Stony Brook to attend the Annual Meeting on Phonology earlier in October. There were a total of four Yale presentations, listed below with links to the abstracts:
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.
This past weekend (June 21-23), the 5th Workshop on Sound Change (WSC 5) took place at UC Davis. Yale Linguistics was represented by Professor Claire Bowern, PhD candidate Rikker Dockum, and graduate student Sarah Babinski, who all presented at the workshop. Claire Bowern gave a talk entitled “Language, Culture, and Australian Exceptionalism,” while Rikker and Sarah gave posters.
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.
Prof. Jason Shaw gave an invited talk at Brown University’s Department of Cognitive, Linguistic & Psychological Sciences. The title of the talk was “Phonological control of time”. In it, he presented how the theory of Articulatory Phonology accounts for language-specific patterns of speech timing and two new challenges for the theory.
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.
