prosodylab at WCCFL

29 Apr 2016 • news

Tomorrow, at 10.30 at WCCFL in Utah:

Liz Smeets, Michael Wagner (McGill): The syntax of focus association in German/Dutch: evidence from scope reconstruction

Kilbourn-Ceron et al. at CLS

29 Apr 2016 • news

Last week we presented a paper on flapping and production planning at CLS:

Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron, Michael Wagner & Meghan Clayards (McGill University) The effect of production planning locality on external sandhi: A study in /t/

*> *The intervocalic flapping of English coronal stops /t, d/ is nearly categorical when the VTV sequence is within a word but variable when a word boundary intervenes, and occurs only rarely across a large boundary such as a clause edge. This is pattern cross-linguistically common in external sandhi — but why are segmental processes at word edges often more variable, and what influences the rate of variability? Previous literature on phonological variability has proposed that phonological rules make reference to syntactic structure or that phonological process are tied to prosodic domains. In contrast, we propose that phonological variability is only indirectly influenced by syntax and prosody through the locality of production planning. This hypothesis is motivated by psycholinguistic models of speech production, and we test its predictions for English flapping in a corpus study and a production experiment. Results show that syntax may have an effect above and beyond prosodic boundary strength, and that the lexical frequency of the following word has a significant influence on rate of flapping, consistent with the LPP hypothesis.**

toward an intonational bestiary

16 Oct 2015 • news • bestiary

Check out tomorrow’s prosodylab poster at NELS 46 at Concordia:

Screen Shot 2015-10-15 at 9.50.13 PM

Daniel Goodhue, Lyana Harrison, Yuen Tung Clémentine Su, and Michael Wagner (2015). Toward a bestiary of English intonational tunes. Poster at the 46th Conference of the North Eastern Linguistic Society, at Concordia University, in Montréal. [abstract] [poster] [items.]

If you want to know about the project and want to listen to the data, have a look here.

Contact us if you’d like to learn more, or want to suggest other annotations or ways to analyze this data. You can also annotate it yourself if you want.

lalala

22 May 2015 • local • news • prosodylab

Earlier this week some of us went to McGill’s gorgeous Gault nature reserve for a l anguage l abs l ab meeting ( lalala ).

Students from Meghan Clayards’s Speech Learning Lab, Florian Jaeger’s HLP lab, Chigusa Kurumada’s Kinder Lab, Morgan Sonderegger’s Montreal Language Modeling Lab, and Michael Wagner’s prosody.lab presented on current projects.

gault2[photo: gui garcia]

Research presentations:

  • Esteban Buz: Contextual confusability, feedback and their effects on speech production
  • Guilherme Garcia: Stress and gradient weight in Portuguese
  • Dan Goodhue: It’s not just what you say, it’s how you say it: Intonation, yes, and no
  • Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron: Phrasing and phonological variability
  • Linda Liu: Learning under causal uncertainty in speech perception
  • Amanda Pogue: Exploring expectations based on speaker-specific variation in informativity

Idea talks:

  • Zach Burchill: Are accents hard to learn?
  • Guilherme Garcia: Second language acquisition of English stress by Québec French speakers
  • Sarah Colby: Effects of normal aging on perceptual flexibility for speech
  • Dan Goodhue: Towards a probabilistic explanation of contextual evidence
  • Dave Kleinschmidt: Learning to adapt
  • Maryam Seifeldin: Adaptation to and generalization of unfamiliar phonetic features

LaLaLa was co-sponsored by funds to the PIs of all participating labs