People
Meghan Sumner
My research focuses on the interaction of phonetic variation with perception, memory, and learning. The amount of variation in the speech signal is astounding, yet listeners are able to overcome this variation with apparently little difficulty. For example, a single speaker can produce a number of acoustically distinct utterances for any given word. Any word can be produced uniquely by different speakers depending on unpredictable indexical characteristics (e.g., gender, age), or more systematic phonetic characteristics (e.g., dialect, native language phonology).
Consider the word card. For a listener, it is not implausible to encounter productions such as [khart] by a native Polish speaker (or a speaker from any other language with word-final devoicing), [kha:d] by a Bostonian, or [kard] by a native speaker of Spanish. The differences between the production [khard] and the few variations above are minimal. But in language, minimal differences are what make two words distinct. For example, was the Polish speaker talking about a cart or a card? Did the man from Boston say cod or card? And (since English listeners categorically perceive voiceless unaspirated stops as voiced), would they know if the Spanish speaker said guard or card?
Understanding how listeners overcome this variation, whether by storing detailed acoustic information, by repeated exposure, by storing speaker-specific information, or by learning to use different phonetic cues for different speakers, will ultimately impact and inform theoretical models of phonetics, phonology, and spoken word recognition.
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Jack Tomlinson
My research, defined broadly, seeks to assess how prosody and other fine phonetic detail influence both the production and interpretation of linguistic meaning. My dissertation dealt with how people interpret uptalk in spontaneous speech and found that listeners make use of temporal information and beliefs about the speaker when determining the meaning of uptalk.
My previous research examined how intonation helps coordinate joint visual attention (with Daniel Richardson and Rick Dale). Together we found that interlocuters visual attention in conversation iis mediated by their their beliefs about what whether their partners can see what they can see. Moreover, speakers' use of rising pitch and backchannels also seem to change as a function of visual common ground.
I along with Jean Fox Tree have researched how listeners interpret quotations introduced by the enquoting device “like". We discovered a radical shift between the use of "like" vs. "said" in the past 25 years and found a new variant of "like", "just like", which seems to be used primarily to quote reported thoughts.
My current research agenda in the phonetics lab examines how listeners adjust their linguistic representations to accommodate phonetic variation. We are specifically examining how native English speakers adapt to foreign accented speech. Meghan Sumner, Marie Catherine de Marneffe, and myself, are using mouse-tracking technology to access how English speakers adapt to L2 French speakers. In another project, Meghan Sumner and I are examining how both bottom up phonetic information in different communicative environments might effect perceptual learning.
Marisa Pineda
First language acquisition
Timing and turn taking in children’s speech
First qualifying paper toward Stanford degree. This project is an investigation of the emergence of timing accommodation items (TAIs) in English-speaking children, modeling the conditions of TAI usage over the ages 1;2-3;7, and the potential pragmatic implications of TAI development. Members of the reviewing committee: Eve V. Clark (co-chair), Dan Jurafsky (co-chair), Arto Antilla, and Meghan Sumner.
Page turn study of prosody comprehension
A joint project with Professor Eve V. Clark. This project investigates how children learn to project turn-relevance places (TRPs) in conversation by looking closer at young children’s acquisition of prosodic comprehension. Since so little is currently known about the acquisition of prosody comprehension, the study will also serve to add to our general knowledge of the course of acquisition.
Second language acquisition
Non-native VOT as a window to phonetic adaptation
Second qualifying paper toward Stanford degree. This project explores variation in the English voice onset time (VOT) of native French speakers who are L2 English speakers. I am looking to the variation in VOT production to provide insight into specific phonetic processing practices L2 speakers may be using while producing English long-lag VOT. Members of the reviewing committee: Eve V. Clark, Dan Jurafsky , Arto Antilla, and Meghan Sumner.
Other
A language emergence model with Bayesian learners, paired with a human subjects experiment. In collaboration with Linsey Smith, Ph.D. student, Northwestern University and Professor Tom Griffiths, UC Berkeley.
Katherine Geenberg
Overall, I am interested in cognitive and social models of phonetic variation, and what can or can't be accounted for in different models of individual speaker variation.
As a sociophonetician, I am primarily interested in the social meaning of phonetic features. Thus, I study how different speech features are taken up as speaker moves to create distinctive styles and personae (e.g., 'the know-it-all student', 'the Southern Belle) in production analyses. The compelling (and difficult) crux of style study is that the same speech feature can take on myriad meanings when embedded in different styles.
Though many sociophoneticians focus on vowel quality, I also prefer to investigate the linguistic and social meaning of interactional and/or suprasegmental speech features, including speech rate, pauses, intonation, and voice quality (creaky voice, nasality).
On the perception end of the production-perception loop, I'm fascinated by the perception of speech features with respect to hearer social judgments. My perception studies in phonetics aim particularly to disentangle the relationship between perception and ideology. For example, how are the perceptions of pauses, speech rate, and intonation influenced by gender ideology? And what aspects or processes of perception, then, are non-ideological? This interest in perception and ideology goes arm-in-arm with an interest in the potential consciousness and/or agentivity of speaker-hearer identity construction.
Olga Dmitrieva
I am interested in phonetics and phonetically based phonology and in finding out how physiological, acoustic, and psychological constraints on human speech production and perception influence a language's phonological system, phonetic inventory, and lexicon. For example, gradient or stochastic effects in phonotactics may accumulate with time and ultimately shape the lexicon of a language. I am currently working on a project investigating gradient OCP effects on the well-formedness of English syllables and the interaction of these effects with stress, consonant and vowel quality (with Arto Anttila, Matt Adams, Scott Grimm, Jason Grafmiller, and Yuan Zhao).
I have also studied variation in the production of geminate consonants in Russian. I was especially interested in identifying factors affecting the probability of degemination and relating them to forces that govern geminate inventories and distribution cross-linguistically. This work is yielding evidence for the universal character of the constraints on geminate typology: while categorical in some languages, they may be soft or stochastic in others. One aim of this project is to demonstrate empirically that there may be phonetic reasons for the existence or non-existence of certain types of geminates or for the abundance/scarcity of geminates in certain phonetics contexts. The possibility of modeling stochastic effects in phonological theory is another goal I pursue in this project.
Another of my research interests is audience design in speech and listener-directed speech styles. Together with Rebecca Scarborough, Jason Brenier, Yuan Zhao, and Lauren Hall-Lew, I conducted a study of the acoustic features of foreigner-directed speech, in which speech addressed to a real foreigner was compared with speech addressed an imagined foreign interlocutor.
I am also interested in the production and perception of non-native speech, sociolinguistic aspects of second language acquisition and use, and the interaction between first and second language. In particular, the question I try to answer in my research is when and how a second language starts to penetrate the speaker's native language, altering its phonetics and phonology. For example, in my study of incomplete neutralization in Russian final devoicing, I found that there was a difference in the production of final devoicing between monolingual speakers of Russian and Russian speakers with knowledge of English.
Seung-Kyung Kim
My main interests center on phonology and phonetics. Speech perception, loanword phonology, and phonological acquisition are some of the topics I find interesting. I am a Korean girl, born and raised in Korea.
Stephanie Shih
Interests
Phonology, prosody, rhythm, meter, poetics, music (esp. linguistic-musical interface), non-concatenative morphology, syntactic processing
Languages
English, Picuris (Northern Tiwa), Music
Yuan Zhao
I’m a fourth year PhD student specializing in phonetics, laboratory phonology and speech research in general. Currently my work focuses on investigating the role of statistical inference in the perceptual learning of non-native speech categories. Another line of my research involves using both corpus and experimental approaches to investigate phonetic variations across genres and styles. On of the main goals of my previous research is to model phonetic variations in conversations and in different speech genres, such as foreigner-directed speech and emotional speech. I’m also interested in lexicon-internal factors that influence our speech production and recognition, especially how lexical factors such as word frequency and neighborhood influence tone production. I’ve also been working on disfluencies and in particular the role of disfluencies in speech production and comprehension. At the application end, I’ve been collaborating with my colleagues on the automatic detection of disfluencies in natural conversations.