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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231201T110000
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SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Morgan Sonderegger: New perspectives on speech variability from large-scale studies
DESCRIPTION:Location – Dodd 146 \nNew perspectives on speech variability from large-scale studies \nI present two studies which aim to understand the structure and sources of variability in speech production\, enabled by novel quantitative methods. I also discuss several open-source tools for automatic analysis of speech which enable such large-scale studies by speeding up or replacing manual processing. \nThe first study asks how much “the same” phonetic effects vary across languages\, and what their distributions can tell us. It is well known that vowel F0 tends to be higher for high vowels compared to low vowels (VF0) and F0 following voiceless obstruents tends to be higher than F0 following voiced obstruents (CF0). These “intrinsic F0” effects have been extensively investigated\, but largely in lab speech in individual languages\, making it difficult to settle the long-standing questions of to what extent they are “automatic” versus “controlled”\, and whether cross-linguistic variation can be systematically explained (e.g. smaller VF0/CF0 in tone languages). We map out the distribution of intrinsic F0 effects across 20 languages\, using large corpora of read speech. We find that both VF0 and CF0 effects are robust across languages in terms of effect direction\, but that languages vary greatly in VF0 and CF0 effect size. Most of this variability appears to be unexplained by phonological properties of the language (e.g. tone). Finally\, we find that the CF0 effect is larger than the VF0 effect in almost every language\, and the CF0 effect is more variable across languages. These patterns suggest a possible explanation for the cross-linguistic tendency for CF0 effects to lead to sound change (“tonogenesis”) much more often than VF0 effects. (Joint work with Connie Ting & Meghan Clayards) \nA second study is part of the SPeech Across Dialects of English (SPADE) project\, which examined existing datasets of Old World (British) and New World (North American) English spanning 100+ years\, to gain an improved understanding of stability and variation in a spoken language across space and time. We consider variability in English sibilants in 5k speakers from 27 geo-social-ethnic regions. We analyse spectral peak measures using a Bayesian statistical model which explicitly models token\, speaker\, and region- level variability. Following previous phonetic and sociolinguistic research we expected English /s/ to be more variable than /sh/\, and for both sounds to look broadly similar across dialects. The results\, however\, differ according to the level at which we consider variability — for example\, /s/ is more variable within-speaker than /sh/\, but not more variable across  regions. Our results likely reflect physical and social-indexical sources of variation\, and connect to basic issues in sociolinguistics and sound change. (Joint work with Jane Stuart-Smith\, Jeff Mielke)
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-morgan-sonderegger/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231208T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20231208T130000
DTSTAMP:20231202T002941Z
CREATED:20231005T173356Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20231202T002941Z
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SUMMARY:Colloquium Talk - Alexis Wellwood: Temporal constitution in language and mind
DESCRIPTION:Location – Dodd 146 \nTemporal constitution in language and mind \nSemanticists posit at least two categories of dynamic entity—event and process—in their explanations of the semantic properties of different classes of verbs and verb phrases. I consider the event-process distinction as a case study in the interface between linguistic and extralinguistic cognition. In a series of experiments\, we tested whether different sorts of subtle differences in “temporal shaping” across different types of dynamic displays would be sufficient to predict preference for resolving a novel verb as event-y or process-y. For example\, a circle moves continuously back-and-forth across the screen\, with movement broken up into equi-sized temporal portions separated by brief pauses (event-y) or not (process-y). In forced choice tasks\, we asked whether people would differentially choose deverbal count syntax (The circle did some gleebs) versus mass (The circle did some gleebing) to describe such scenes. In quantity estimation tasks\, we tested whether they would differentially track natural number versus some continuous dimension for verbal comparatives (The circle gleebed more than the square did). Indeed\, we found preference for count syntax and number-based quantification with event-y scenes\, but no categorical preference for process-y scenes. In the talk\, I suggest how to make sense of such findings on the linguistic and nonlinguistic sides. Specifically\, I suggest that semantic description combines (linguistic-)syntactic and conceptual(-syntactic) information\, with functional meanings directing binding relations across distinct core knowledge domains.
URL:https://linguistics.ucla.edu/event/colloquium-talk-alexis-wellwood/
CATEGORIES:Colloquium
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