Category: Prevelar Merger

Postdoc coming!

4/21/2024

A new researcher Dr. Lisa Sullivan, currently a postdoc at the University of Manitoba, will be joining my lab this fall! She will be supported by a Canadian fellowship for two years to work on a project about prevelar raising/merger (pronouncing words like bag and leg more like vague). The project would extend her dissertation work -- and my own "bag-beg-bagel" prevelar merger studies -- to map the phenomenon across North America, collect massive numbers of audio recordings and perceptions online, and provide public education about dialect differences and linguistic discrimination, all in one interactive website or app. Lisa has a background in web development and experience incorporating writing practice into curriculum development, as well as her degrees in linguistics. We'll be lucky to have her!

Prevelar FOOLS

4/1/2024

In anticipation of a big project expansion, I gave an overview of prevelar mergers at the Friends of Oklahoma Language Studies (FOOLS) group on campus. This has been a long-standing sociophonetic project that I hope to revive with new data soon. I haven't presented on it at OSU, so it was great to nerd out about one of my favorite topics with new linguists -- for over an hour!

Article accepted: Prevelar merger in production and perception

1/13/2023

My latest paper on the bag-beg-vague merger in the Pacific Northwest has been accepted to the Journal of Phonetics. The title explains: Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores and confusion matrices. I've been considering ways to compare the two types of data for a long time, so I'm very pleased with this one. Special thanks to Santiago Barreda for the direction on confusion matrices (and bootstrapping confidence intervals on stats that don't normally provide things like p-values).

Revisions

10/3/2022

This has been a busy few weeks, with three revisions recently submitted to journals:

"Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," Part 3 of my series on how listeners judge the personalities and competence of cochlear implant users
"Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores and confusion matrices," which addresses the challenge of comparing continuous vowel production measures with responses from discrete perception tasks
"Dysarthric speech familiarization: Distributed practice and interleaving," spearheaded by Mik Martinelli, former linguistics grad student and now faculty at Midwestern State, and my OSU colleagues Sara Loss and Sabiha Parveen

ASA Denver

5/27/2022

After over two years of online conferences, I attended the Acoustical Society of America in Denver. It was great to catch up with old friends and see posters in person. The posters were very spread out, which was great for the acoustics -- we could hear each other without yelling, and we weren't bumping into each other. It would be nice if we could do it that way forever!

Three papers submitted

2/24/2022

This has been a busy winter, with three new manuscripts recently submitted to journals:

"Employers’ speech-based first impressions of cochlear implant users," Part 3 of my series on how listeners judge the personalities and competence of cochlear implant users
"Production and perception of prevelar merger: Two-dimensional comparisons using Pillai scores," which addresses the challenge of comparing continuous vowel production measures with responses from discrete perception tasks
"Dysarthric speech familiarization: Distributed practice and interleaving," spearheaded by Mik Martinelli, former linguistics grad student and now faculty at Midwestern State, and my OSU colleagues Sara Loss and Sabiha Parveen

BAG-BEG-BAGEL paper published in LVC

6/30/2021

My paper on the merger of words like BEG and VAGUE, and sometimes BAG, has been published in Language Variation and Change (doi:10.1017/S0954394521000028). I started this project as a student over 7 years ago, but it took a back seat during my dissertation and postdoc until I started revisiting it 3 years ago with some new methods and stats. This paper looks at production (pronunciation) in Seattle, and the next paper will compare production and perception among a slightly wider range of Northwesterners.

ICPhS Proceedings

8/1/2019

My paper "Prevelar merger in production vs. perception" was accepted to the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) in Melbourne, Australia! This conference meets only every four years, and short papers are reviewed in full (rather than by abstract) and published in the proceedings if accepted. Here's a link to the full proceedings.

PhonFest

6/14/2018

Last week, I attended PhonFest at Indiana University, which had an unusual format: a weekend of short courses focusing on phonetic field methods (four sessions each by four invited speakers) and then a week of "work time," when attendees could help each other get past tricky spots in the analysis of our current projects. It was a great opportunity to focus on a problem I've been putting off: developing a quantitative metric to compare vowel merger in both production and perception. I presented a poster on the problem and some options I was considering, got feedback and ideas from others, and left with a solution!

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