Graduate students will present on their first comprehensive papers. This is the *first* graduate students mini-conference in our department! It is very important to attend to show your support and your interest in our colleagues work. Everyone is welcome!
Adbul Alamri: Lexical properties in phonological alternations in Faifa’a Arabic
There is no consensus among linguists on whether phonological alternations can be predicted by lexical properties such as neighborhood density (ND), lexical frequency (LF) and word length (WL). Research has found that words that reside in dense neighborhoods are less likely to exhibit phonological alternations than words residing in sparse neighborhoods (Wedel, 2002, Johnsen, 2011 and Ussishkin & Wedel, 2009). It has been also found in many languages that shorter words are less likely to alternate than longer words (Inlelas et al, 1997; Pycha et al, 2007). This study aims to assess the role that lexical properties could play in phonological alternations in Faifa’s Arabic (a dialect spoken by about 19 tribes that all live in an isolated mountains in the southwest of Saudi Arabia). In this dialect, there are many phonological alternations that are considered dominant, however, there is a number of words that resist these alternations. Thus, the goal of this study is to describe these alternations and to assess whether lexical properties are good predictors of phonological alternations.
Leonardo Alves Soares: On the Nasal Vowels of Brazilian Portuguese
Nasalization in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) is a heated topic among Luso-Brazilian linguists. The language has two types of nasalization. The first type, which I name homosyllabic, occurs within a syllable boundary whereas the second type, which I name heterosyllabic, crosses the syllable boundary. Traditionally, nasal vowels in the language, whether arising from homosyllabic or heterosyllabic nasalization, are analyzed as not being part of the phonology of the language (cf. Mattoso-Câmara, 1953), which suggests they are the result of phonetic implementation. Using oral and nasal airflow data from native speakers, I seek to determine whether nasalization in BP is the result of a phonological rule, or whether it is the result of phonetic implementation. Challenging traditional analyses, my premise is that homosyllabically nasalized vowels are the result of a phonological rule of nasalization while heterosyllabically nasalized vowels are the result of phonetic implementation. Based on previous research by Cohn (Cohn, 1990, 1993, 1998, 2007), I predict that the amount of nasal airflow will be consistent throughout or for most of the duration of homosyllabically nasalized vowel segments in BP. Likewise, I predict that the amount nasal airflow will increase, or decrease, throughout the duration of heterosyllabically nasalized vowel segments.
Michèle Burkholder: Exemplar theory and the bilingual lexicon: The mental representations of cognates
Exemplar theory postulates that mental representations of lexical items are clusters of memory traces (“exemplars”) which include the phonetic and semantic details associated with each experience; those variants of an exemplar experienced more frequently will thus have a greater influence on the overall mental representation. There is psycholinguistic evidence suggesting that lexical items which share their form and meaning across a bilingual’s two languages (“cognates”) share a representation at a morphological level (e.g. Sánchez-Casas & Almagro, 1999; Davis et al., 2010). If this is true, then Exemplar theory would predict that the more frequently experienced variant of a cognate (i.e. that which occurs in the speaker’s L1) will shift its exemplar towards the L1 phonetic form, resulting in the production of an L2 form which has greater similarity to that of the L1. The goal of my first comprehensive examination is to investigate this prediction.
Will Dalton: An acoustic and articulatory analysis of Canadian French vowel harmony
On the surface, Canadian French vowel harmony does not have much in common with typical harmony systems (e.g. Turkish, Hungarian) in that it is optional, highly variable and monovalent. An alternate possibility is that the apparent assimilation between lax vowels is a case of vowel-to-vowel coarticulation. Little quantitative or experimental work has been conducted on Canadian French vowel harmony however and it is therefore unknown whether the vowel assimilation is due to a phonetic, gradient process of coarticulation or a phonological, categorical process of harmony. The purpose of this research is to disambiguate between the two alternatives. Fourteen native speakers of various Canadian French dialects participated in a production study. Acoustic and articulatory analyses (the latter through the use of ultrasound imaging) show that high vowels in harmony target position are intermediate between non-harmonic tense and lax vowels in terms of F1 and its articulatory correlates, tongue height and/or tongue root advancement. Furthermore, the results show that the assimilatory effects are influenced by the place of articulation and number of intervening consonants. These effects combined implicate coarticulation as the basis of this particular sound pattern.
Laura Kastronic: Liaison in Canadian French
The purpose of this study is to determine to what degree liaison in spoken French-Canadian discourse is a function of style and social status as well as to what extent internal factors condition its application.In addition, I will investigate the link between prescription and actual use of liaison in Canadian French by examining variation in contexts which are labelled by grammarians as obligatory.I will analyse data obtained from Corpus Français de l’Outaouais au nouveau millénaire: milieu scolaire et milieu social (Poplack & Bourdages, 2008), which is a corpus comprised of the spoken discourse of both students and teachers in formal and informal contexts. I hypothesize that rates of liaison in certain contexts will vary based on the social roles of the speakers and the expectations associated with these roles. Preliminary results reveal that teachers use less of the stigmatized forms than students and that both cohorts exhibit variability in obligatory liaison contexts.
Lyra Magloughlin: An ultrasound study of North American English /ɹ/ production in typically developing children during acquisition
North American English /ɹ/ is an articulatorily complex sound that is often one of the last to be acquired by children. While the articulatory research on child production of /ɹ/ is relatively sparse, considerable variability has been reported in the literature on adult production of this acoustically stable sound (e.g. Delattre and Freeman, 1968; Mielke et al., 2010; Campbell et al., 2011). The proposed experiment will explore children’s articulation of North American English /ɹ/ using ultrasound in order to examine whether there is a relationship between the variability we observe with adults, and the articulatory strategies children employ during acquisition.
