Congrats to UROP grant recipients
Congratulations to Jimmy Sbordone and Dallas Walter, who were awarded Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) grants to work on research projects in Spring 2016! Below are brief descriptions of the projects they will be working on:
- James Sbordone: “Phonetic description of Southeastern Pomo, an endangered language of California”
Jimmy will be working on an acoustic analysis of recordings of Southeastern Pomo, a severely endangered language historically spoken in northern California. These data will ultimately contribute to a phonetic description of the idiolect of the last living fluent speaker as well as a diachronic comparison between her speech and the speech of the preceding generation (captured on archival recordings).
- Dallas Walter: “Korean fricatives: Diachronic changes in phonetic enhancement strategies”
Dallas will be carrying out analyses of younger and older Korean speakers’ production of the fricative contrast between fortis /s*/ and non-fortis /s/. The recordings are from an experiment conducted earlier this year, which was designed to examine the phonetic properties that speakers exaggerate in these fricatives when speaking in the ‘clear speech’ register. The phonetic data that Dallas compiles will provide evidence to support a phonological classification of the non-fortis fricative in the context of the Korean laryngeal system.