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).
This has been a busy few weeks, with three revisions recently submitted to journals:
This has been a busy winter, with three new manuscripts recently submitted to journals:
I've recently started working with Lisa Sullivan, a PhD student at the University of Toronto, on a proposal to fund her as a postdoc next year. She is applying for a Canadian postdoctoral fellowship that would allow her to come work in my lab for two years on a project about prevelar raising (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 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!
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!
Also got to see a lot around Vienna, the Danube, and Bratislava. It was very easy to get around on public transit, and there is so much to see -- have to go back someday!
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