We will have our second colloquium this Friday, September 20th, and our speaker will be Morgan Sonderegger from McGill. Here is the title and the abstract of his talk at 3:30 pm. The room number and a Zoom link will be provided in a reminder later this week.

New perspectives on speech variability from large-scale studies
I present two studies which aim to understand the structure and sources of variability in speech production, enabled by novel quantitative methods making it easier to study the same phenomenon across many languages (Study 1) or dialects (Study 2). I’ll first discuss open-source tools for automatic analysis of speech which enable such large-scale studies by speeding up or replacing manual processing (PolyglotDB, Montreal Forced Aligner). The first study asks how much “the same” phonetic effects vary across 20 languages, and what their distributions can tell us, focusing on effects of vowel height and consonant voicing on F0 (“intrinsic F0 effects”). Consonant-induced effects are larger and more variable than vowel height effects across languages, suggesting a possible explanation for why only the former commonly leads to sound change. The second study, using data from the SPADE project (https://spade.glasgow.ac.uk/), examines variability in English sibilants in 5k speakers from 27 geo-social-ethnic regions to ask: is /s/ more variable than /sh/? On the surface a simple question, the results differ according to the level at which we consider variability.

Morgan will also give two additional workshops this week.

Thursday workshop (4-5:30 Thursday, ILC N458): Unpacking results of regression models
On contrast coding, interpreting interactions, and (especially) marginal effects using the emmeans package. For people with some experience with fitting mixed effects models in R.

Psycholing Workshop (10-11:30 Friday, ILC N400): Walkthrough of corpus analysis, with corpus of sibilant variation as example
Based on https://people.linguistics.mcgill.ca/~morgan/sibilantsIcphs2023.pdf