Susannah Levi presented a poster at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Paris.

The poster, co-authored with Stephen Winters and David Pisoni, was entitled, “A cross-language familiar talker advantage. The abstract is available as a downloadable .pdf file.

Susi now takes up her new position as Assistant Professor of Phonetics in the Department of Speech-Language Pathology and Audiology at New York University.

Pam Beddor gave an invited presentation on Perceiving Coarticulatory Variation at the international workshop “La Coarticulation:
Indices, Direction et Représentation”

The workshop was held at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Montpellier Dec. 7, 2007

Pam Beddor, Andries Coetzee, and Kevin McGowan have recently returned from NYU where they attended Ultrafest IV. As previously mentioned here, Ultrafest is an annual opportunity for linguists and speech scientists using ultrasound to get together, share work they’re doing with this relatively new tool and discuss common solutions to ultrasound’s unique challenges. We learned a great deal about how ultrasound is used, what its strengths are, and what challenges we can expect to face as we move in this new direction. The department is now researching ultrasound hardware options and will be reviewing demonstration models soon.

Pam and Kevin also had the opportunity to visit the new home of Haskins Laboratories where Pam gave an invited talk on “The phonetics and phonology of nasal gestures” as part of the Haskins Staff Talk series.

During the visit they toured the facilities and were given a hands (and chins)-on introduction to HOCUS (the Haskins Optically-Corrected Ultrasound System) — a bold, multi-year project at Haskins to use optical tracking to allow free and natural head motion during analysis of running speech while still providing the data necessary to orient ultrasound images to the location of the passive articulators in four dimensions.

“Ultrasound systems for research in linguistics range from compact laptop-sized units one can take into the field to finely-tuned installations such as those at Haskins or Maureen Stone’s lab at the University of Maryland, Baltimore“, Kevin reported. “This trip will definitely let us take advantage of others’ experiences with ultrasound as we add this tool to our own lab.”

After successfully defending his dissertation in April, Robert Felty started a post-doctoral fellowship at Indiana University in July, under the tutelage of Prof. David Pisoni. The Speech Research Lab at Indiana University has been in operation for over 30 years, and Prof. Pisoni has funded post-docs throughout this time with an NIH training grant. The lab is built in an interdisciplinary and collaborative manner, with a variety of psychologists, neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, speech and hearing scientists, and linguists.

Robert is currently working on two projects in the lab:

Discovering neighborhoods through recognition errors

In this collaborative project with Adam Buchwald, we have developed a large (> 1400 words) stimulus list which is designed to be representative of the entire English lexicon in terms of lexical frequency, number of syllables, syllable structure, and initial phoneme. We are presenting these materials in open-set word recognition tasks in order to discover what words are actually being activated in the mental lexicon

A new perceptually robust test of spoken word recognition

In this project with David Pisoni, we are developing a new spoken word recognition test battery to be used in clinical situations, which more accurately represents normal communicative situations, by including sources of variation that we commonly encounter, including speaker specific characteristics such as gender and dialectal variation, as well as a variety of degraded listening situations

You can learn more about Robert’s research from his website.

Pam Beddor, Kevin McGowan and Andries Coetzee are attending Ultravest IV at
NYU this week-end.

Ultrafest is an annual conference on the use of ultrasound technology in speech research. We are thinking of acquiring an ultrasound machine for the Phonetics Lab, and they are going to Ultrafest to learn more about ultrasound, how it works, what it can be used for, etc.

Pam and Kevin will also spend a day at Haskins Labs before Ultrafest.

POST-NASAL DEVOICING IN TSWANA
Andries W. Coetzee, Susan Lin & Rigardt Pretorius
ICPhS XVI. p. 861-864

Tswana is traditionally described as having a process of post-nasal devoicing (/mba/ > [mpa]). If this is accurate, then Tswana poses a challenge to views that neutralization processes should be articulatorily grounded. Airflow leakage through the nasal cavity should promote, not inhibit, voicing post-nasally. Zsiga et al. performed acoustic analysis of the speech of 6 Tswana speakers, and found no evidence of post-nasal devoicing. They conclude that, counter to traditional descriptions, Tswana does not have post-nasal devoicing. In an independent study, we collected speech from 12 Tswana speakers. Four of our speakers showed clear and consistent post-nasal devoicing. In this paper, we present the data for these 4 speakers to show that at least some speakers of Tswana do have an active process of postnasal devoicing. We also consider possible explanations for this process, arguing that it is motivated by perceptual rather than articulatory considerations.

Full paper

Solé, M. J., Beddor, P. S., Ohala, M. Eds. (2007) Experimental Approaches
to Phonology. Oxford University Press.

Table of contents

From the publisher:
This wide-ranging survey of experimental methods in phonetics and phonology shows the insights and results provided by different methods of investigation, including laboratory-based, statistical, psycholinguistic, computational-modeling, corpus, and field techniques. The five chapters in the first part of the book examine the recent history and interrelations of theory and method. The remaining 18 chapters are organized into parts devoted to four key current areas of research: phonological universals; phonetic variation and phonological change; maintaining, enhancing, and modeling phonological contrasts; and phonological knowledge. The book provides fresh insights into the findings and theoretical advances that emerge from experimental investigation of phonological structure and phonological knowledge, as well as critical perspectives on experimental methods in the perception, production, and modeling of speech.