Graduate student Alessa Farinella gave an invited joint talk with Daniel Kaufman (Queens College, CUNY) entitled Tagalog prosody in the Austronesian context: word-level prominence, downstep, and the tune inventory on October 7, 2024. This talk was part of the Exploring Tagalog Linguistics talks in the Tagalog Lecture Series, hosted by the Batangas Tagalog initiative of Eva Huber and Dr. Aireen Barrios-Arnuco at the University of Zurich (Switzerland) and De La Salle University (Philippines). The talk was over Zoom at 12:15-1:30pm CET, 6:15-7:30 pm PHT.

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

The University of Massachusetts, Amherst will host the 31st Annual Meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA) as well as a special session on “Prosodic and psycholinguistic connections in verb initial languages.” The conference will take place in person at UMass in Amherst, Massachusetts from June 12-June 14, 2024.  

Since 1994, AFLA has served internationally as the most prominent and influential venue for presentation and discussion of recent research on Austronesian languages. Research disseminated at AFLA spans all subfields of linguistics (syntax, semantics, phonology, morphology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, historical linguistics, etc).  

The aim of the special session on connections between verb initial languages is to bring together researchers working on prosody and psycholinguistics in Austronesian as well as verb-initial languages in other language families, creating a space for scholars who do not normally collaborate to share ideas and perspectives. The special session aims to foster discussion of the commonalities in the comprehension and production of verb-initial languages and the prosody of verb-initial languages. It also aims to contribute to informing existing theories of sentence processing and prosody, which have been developed primarily based on verb-medial and verb-final languages thus far.  

In addition, there will be a pre-conference workshop on June 11, 2024 on a computational, data-driven approach to working with prosodic data. The workshop is intended to offer methodology for initial exploratory work in languages with limited or no prosodic descriptions for fieldworkers from a variety of backgrounds, including those without training in prosody.  

We invite abstracts for 20 minute talks and posters on work in all areas of Austronesian linguistics, as well as abstracts on work on prosody and experimental linguistics in verb initial languages from any language family.  

Abstract guidelines 

Abstracts (including references and figures) should not exceed 2 single-spaced pages. Submissions must be on A4 size paper with 2 cm margins, and minimum 11pt font. All abstracts should be anonymous. Maximum 2 single-authored submissions per author (no limit for co-authored abstracts). Abstracts must be submitted as a single pdf document through the submission portal (which will open soon). Abstract deadline: January 20, 2023 

Note: We will give preference to new work, but given the unusually short time frame between the previous AFLA and AFLA 31, we encourage work that has already been presented as long as there is some new development. 

We especially encourage submissions from junior scholars and students. To ensure the participation of junior scholars, we will provide a limited number of travel stipends for students whose abstracts are accepted for a poster or presentation.  

Please visit https://websites.umass.edu/afla31/ for more details, and email afla31@umass.edu with questions. If you’d like to subscribe to our mailing list, visit https://groups.io/g/afla/join and enter your email address. 

A number of current students/faculty and alumni presented at the 20th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) held in Prague, August 7-11, 2023. ICPhS is held only every four years and is sometimes called the Phonetics Olympics—it’s the largest meetings of phoneticians.

Presenters from UMass past and present included: current graduate students Alessa Farinella, Cerys Hughes, and Seung Suk (Josh) Lee; faculty members John Kingston and Kristine Yu; former graduate students Ivy Hauser (PhD 2019, now at UT Arlington), Amanda Rysling (PhD 2017, now at UCSC), and Shayne Sloggett (PhD 2017, now at University of York) ; visiting lecturer Sang-Im Lee-Kim (2014-2015, now at Hanyang University).

The talks and posters given by UMass affiliates included:

• Alessa Farinella, Constantijn Kaland & Daniel Kaufman: Gesture and Prosodic Prominence in Ambonese Indonesian
• Cerys Hughes, Seung Suk Lee, Alessa Farinella and Kristine Yu: Phonetic Implementation of Phonologically Different High Tone Spans in Luganda [links: paper, note: presentation included significant updates from paper!]
• John Kingston and Amanda Rysling: When is enough, enough? VOT judgments vary by voicing intensity, aspiration intensity, voice quality, and rate of change
• Seung Suk Lee: Detecting the Accentual Phrase boundaries in Seoul Korean using tonal and segmental cues [links: paper, poster]
• Sang-Im Lee-Kim and Hsiang-Yu Tong: Sibilant perception by merged speakers: the case of Taiwan Mandarin
• Liang Zhao, Eleanor Chodroff, and Shayne Sloggett: Conditions on adaptation to an unfamiliar lexical tone system: the role of quantity and quality of exposure

Two NGOs that our students Duygu and Özge suggested are the following:

– Ahbap is an NGO that you can donate to in USD or EUR: https://ahbap.org/disasters-turkey

– Turkish Philanthropy fund earthquake relief campaign. This is tax deductible and some employers will match your donation: https://donate.tpfund.org/…/tpf-turkiye-earthquake/c465112

The undergraduate students in the Fall 2022 edition of Linguist 409 (Introduction to Computational Linguistics) presented their final projects on texts used for Mozilla’s Common Voice at the end of the semester. Mozilla’s Common Voice is a project to create a publicly open audio corpus for developing speech technology for languages across the world, since the massive data sets used for developing commercial voice technology products like Alexa and Siri are not available to the public and limited in their representation across languages and individuals. It is very easy to contribute your own voice recordings via the Common Voice website, but to keep the datasets open, the texts that contributors read must be in the public domain.

The students noticed that some of the sentences in the texts can be a bit odd and used their Python skills and linguistic acumen to convert graphemes to phonemes in the texts and analyze the distribution of n-grams of phones in English, Japanese, Spanish, and Russian.

The special issue of Language and Speech: Sociolectal and Dialectal Variation in Prosody co-edited by Meghan Armstrong-Abrami (UMass Hispanic Linguistics), Mara Breen (Mount Holyoke Psychology), Shelome Gooden (University of Pittsburgh Linguistics), Erez Levon (University of Bern, Professor of Sociolinguistics), and Kristine Yu (UMass Linguistics) has finally officially been released!

The special issue grew out of the Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody 4 (ETAP4) conference hosted at UMass in October 2018.

Linguistics faculty and undergraduate students were out in force representing the linguistics department at the College of Humanities and Fine Arts (HFA) Open House on Sunday October 23! The open house was an event held as part of Fall Visit days for prospective undergraduates.

The enthusiastic linguistics undergraduate students present to tell prospective students about the linguistics major were Emily Knick (Linguistics ’23), Levi Logan (Linguistics, Electrical Engineering ’25), and Olivia Nash (Chinese, Linguistics ’22). Also present were faculty members and undergraduate advisors Kristine Yu and Vincent Homer.

Range in the use and realization of BIN in African American English has been published at Language and Speech online first! This work was done by faculty members Lisa Green and Kristine Yu, together with graduate students Anissa Neal and Ayana Whitmal, former Center for the Study of African American Language undergraduate RA Tamira Powe and Deniz Özy?ld?z (Ph.D. ’21, now at U. Konstanz).

This material was based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant BCS-2042939, a UMass Amherst Faculty Research Grant/Healey Endowment Grant, a UMass Amherst Institute of Diversity Sciences Seed Grant, and the UMass Amherst Center for the Study of African American Language. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation (or other funding sources).

Undergraduate linguistics major and experimental labs manager Emily Knick ’23 has been featured in the UMass news story Probing the Mysteries of Language, written by UMass Director of Research Communications, Lauren Rubenstein. The news story brings out Emily’s passion for linguistics research and discusses Emily’s honors thesis project on an in-progress sound change in Japanese plosives, which is being directed by faculty member John Kingston. Congratulations Emily!