Recent news
PAMLab at NWAV 48
Profs. Erker and Lindsey are headed to the University of Oregon for presentations at this week's New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV 48)!
Prof. Erker is giving a talk in the Friday morning Constraints session: "Is lexical frequency overrated?" (9:45am, EMU Cedar & Spruce).
Prof. Lindsey is on two presentations: the first is part of the Thursday morning workshop Variation off the Beaten Track: Expanding Our Understanding of Social Structures (10:00-11:45am, EMU Crater Lake N), while the second (with Katherine Anne Strong and Prof. Katie Drager) is in the Friday morning What's So Standard about Standards? special session ("Linking prestige with power: Gender, oration, and variable affrication in Ende", 8:55am, EMU Gumwood).
Welcome to this fall’s labbies!
Welcome to the current Linguistics students who've joined the lab this semester:
- Felix Kpogo (BU GRS '23) is a second-year PhD student in Linguistics. His interests are in first and second language acquisition (in particular, phonological and lexical acquisition), bilingualism, and African/Ghanaian languages such as Akan, Ga, and Ewe. His previous research examined Akan-English bilinguals' production of English interdental fricatives (Kpogo & Gathercole, in press). Currently, he is working on a qualifying paper about covert contrast in Ga-speaking children as well as Ga-English bilingual children.
- Kevin Samejon (BU GRS '24) is a first-year PhD student in Linguistics. His interests are in phonetics, phonology, speech production and perception, prosody, semantics, and Philippine languages.
- Rui Xu (BU GRS '20) is a second-year MA student in Linguistics. Her interests primarily lie in phonology, syntax, language acquisition, and multilingualism.
And a warm welcome back to Michael as he finishes up work on his UROP project!
Welcome to Prof. Lindsey!
Welcome to Prof. Kate Lindsey, a new faculty affiliate of the lab. Prof. Lindsey is a phonologist who specializes in the study of Ende and other languages of southern New Guinea. Her research interests are in underspecification and variation in phonological systems, vowel harmony and phonological reduplication, fieldwork and language documentation, and language typology. Please say hello if you see her around!
PAMLab at PolyU
Next week, Prof. Chang will be in Hong Kong to give a colloquium at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. The presentation, scheduled for August 26, is entitled "L1 status, crosslinguistic similarity, and transfer in L3 speech perception".
Chapter in Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition
A review chapter entitled "Phonetic drift" (Chang, 2019) has been published in The Oxford Handbook of Language Attrition, edited by Profs. Monika Schmid and Barbara Köpke.
Abstract: This chapter provides an overview of research on the phonetic changes that occur in one's native language (L1) due to recent experience in another language (L2), a phenomenon known as phonetic drift. Through a survey of empirical findings on segmental and suprasegmental acoustic properties, the chapter examines the features of the L1 that are subject to phonetic drift, the cognitive mechanism(s) behind phonetic drift, and the various factors that influence the likelihood of phonetic drift. In short, virtually all aspects of L1 speech are subject to drift, but different aspects do not drift in the same manner, possibly due to multiple routes of L2 influence coexisting at different levels of L1 phonological structure. In addition to the timescale of these changes, the chapter discusses the relationship between phonetic drift and attrition as well as some of the enduring questions in this area.
Paper on L3 tone perception in JASA
A paper entitled "Perception of nonnative tonal contrasts by Mandarin-English and English-Mandarin sequential bilinguals" (Chan & Chang, 2019) has been published in the August issue of the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. This paper describes the L3 tone perception study presented at BUCLD 42, which was completed as part of the requirements for I Lei (Vicky) Chan's MA in Applied Linguistics. Congratulations to Vicky on publishing her first peer-reviewed journal article!
Abstract: This study examined the role of acquisition order and crosslinguistic similarity in influencing transfer at the initial stage of perceptually acquiring a tonal third language (L3). Perception of tones in Yoruba and Thai was tested in adult sequential bilinguals representing three different first (L1) and second language (L2) backgrounds: L1 Mandarin-L2 English (MEBs), L1 English-L2 Mandarin (EMBs), and L1 English-L2 intonational/non-tonal (EIBs). MEBs outperformed EMBs and EIBs in discriminating L3 tonal contrasts in both languages, while EMBs showed a small advantage over EIBs on Yoruba. All groups showed better overall discrimination in Thai than Yoruba, but group differences were more robust in Yoruba. MEBs' and EMBs' poor discrimination of certain L3 contrasts was further reflected in the L3 tones being perceived as similar to the same Mandarin tone; however, EIBs, with no knowledge of Mandarin, showed many of the same similarity judgments. These findings thus suggest that L1 tonal experience has a particularly facilitative effect in L3 tone perception, but there is also a facilitative effect of L2 tonal experience. Further, crosslinguistic perceptual similarity between L1/L2 and L3 tones, as well as acoustic similarity between different L3 tones, play a significant role at this early stage of L3 tone acquisition.
This study followed Open Science practices, and all materials and data are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/etg6k/.
PAMLab at ICPhS 2019
Profs. Chang and Barnes are off to Australia to deliver presentations at next week's International Congress of Phonetic Sciences at the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre.
Prof. Chang is presenting results on tone in heritage Mandarin (from collaborative work with Prof. Yao Yao) in the Monday afternoon poster session (2pm, Main Foyer 2 & 3). The title of the presentation is "Production of neutral tone in Mandarin by heritage, native, and second language speakers".
Prof. Barnes is presenting collaborative work with Drs. Nanette Veilleux, Alejna Brugos, and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel in the Friday afternoon Tone: General oral session (2pm, Room 218). The title of the presentation is "The interaction of timing and scaling in a lexical tone system: An example from Shilluk".
Welcome to this summer’s labbies!
Welcome to the three students who will be joining the lab this summer:
- Celia Anderson (interning from June 24 to August 2) is a rising sophomore majoring in Linguistics and Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Her interests are in modeling language and language learning, prosody, second language acquisition (especially of East Asian languages), bilingual language acquisition, and heritage speakers.
- Harper Pollio-Barbee (interning from May 20 to August 23) is a rising junior majoring in Linguistics and Computer Science at Brandeis University. His interests are in phonetics, phonology, and computational linguistics.
- Xiaoyi Tang (interning from May 15 to August 15) is a second-year master's student in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at the University of Pennsylvania. Her interests are in second language learning, speech perception, phonetic variation, and sociophonetics.
And a warm welcome back to Aspen, Michael, and Shane!
Congrats to Humanities Scholars Award recipient Michael Fang
Congratulations to Jiangnan (Michael) Fang, who was awarded an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) Humanities Scholars Award to work on research in Summer 2019! Below is a brief description of the project he will be working on:
- Jiangnan (Michael) Fang: “De-linking between words in conversational English by native speakers of Mandarin”
Michael will be working on a sociophonetic research project examining features of English spoken by Asian Americans, across a range of ethnicities and life histories in the U.S. In Summer 2019, Michael will analyze speech recordings from interviews with Chinese Americans who learned English as a second language, with a focus on their production of connected speech phenomena such as resyllabification.
Paper on sustained phonetic drift in JPhon
A research article entitled "Language change and linguistic inquiry in a world of multicompetence: Sustained phonetic drift and its implications for behavioral linguistic research" (Chang, 2019) has been published in the "Plasticity of Native Phonetic and Phonological Domains in the Context of Bilingualism" special issue of Journal of Phonetics, guest-edited by Drs. Esther de Leeuw and Chiara Celata.
Abstract: Linguistic studies focusing on monolinguals have often examined individuals with considerable experience using another language. Results of a methodological review suggest that conflating ostensibly 'multicompetent' individuals with monolinguals is still common practice. A year-long longitudinal study of speech production demonstrates why this practice is problematic. Adult native English speakers recently arrived in Korea showed significant changes in their production of English stops and vowels (in terms of voice onset time, fundamental frequency, and formant frequencies) during Korean classes and continued to show altered English production a year later, months after their last Korean class. Consistent with an Incidental Processing Hypothesis (IPH) concerning the processing of ambient linguistic input, some changes persisted even in speakers who reported limited active use of Korean in their daily life. These patterns thus suggest that the linguistic experience obtained in a foreign language environment induces and then prolongs restructuring of the native language, making the multicompetent native speaker in a foreign language environment unrepresentative of a monolingual in a native language environment. Such restructuring supports the view that one's native language continues to evolve in adulthood, highlighting the need for researchers to be explicit about a population under study and to accordingly control (and describe) language background in a study sample.
This study followed Open Science practices, and all materials and data are publicly accessible via the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/d5qzj/ and https://osf.io/u7864/.