Jon Yip and Eric Brown are attending the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute for 8 weeks this summer at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

SEASSI is supported by a consortium of over a dozen universities, including the University of Michigan.  The program offers language and cultural classes to undergraduate and graduate students, professionals and heritage speakers in almost every national language of Southeast Asia, as well as some minority languages.  SEASSI provides one of the only opportunities in the United States to take certain Southeast Asian languages for credit.  This summer, Jon is taking Khmer language classes and acquainting himself with implosive stops and central vowel diphthongs.  Eric is taking Lao language classes and collecting information on the heritage language programs offered by SEASSI.  Those traveling to Madison the first week of August should come and watch them both play Javanese gamelan!”

Carmel O’Shannessy is in Lajamanu working on a grant from the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Program (hosted at SOAS) and Janganpa Association, a Warlpiri association. She’s documenting traditional Warlpiri songs. The songs form narratives, in which ancestral beings travel across the country. The songs use some words that are used in spoken Warlpiri and many that are not, and the grammar is completely different from spoken Warlpiri. The phonology appears to be the same.

In addition she’s collecting data on Light Warlpiri and code-switching by Warlpiri speakers who don’t speak Light Warlpiri.

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.”