The following people are (or have been) involved with the Douglass Phonetics Lab in various ways. Many of them have broad interdisciplinary interests, and also work in other labs or research groups on campus.

Current

Jeff Berry studies the reduction of tones and consonants in Mandarin conversational speech, and the phonetics of Scottish Gaelic. He also does research in speech technology and articulatory phonetics.

Dan Brenner is currently looking into production and perception of reduced speech in Japanese. He also has an interest (or several) in the Chinese languages and Korean.

Maggie Camp is investigating Japanese lesbian speech, both in terms of acoustic and perceptual analyses as well as sociolinguistic expressions of identity. Maggie is a graduate student in the East Asian Studies department.

Miriam Diaz is a student in SLAT and is interested in the acquisition of L2 and L3 sound systems.

Amy Fountain is interested in phonetics, phonology and morphophonology, and in language endangerment and documentation, particularly with respect to American Indian languages.

Erin Good (2008) studies the interaction between prosody and the semantic meaning of an utterance. She also works in the Phonological Acquisition Lab investigating how children acquire prosody. Erin is currently an adjunct at the University of Arizona.

Amy LaCross currently takes care of the lab schedule and is interested in Mongolian phonology and phonetics. She is also intersted in speech perception, psycholinguistics, phonology, phonetics. Amy is a graduate student in the Linguistics Department. She is also involved in the PsyCol lab.

Natasha Warner is the director of the Douglass Phonetics Lab, and is an associate professor in the Linguistics Department. Her research is in two areas: phonetics/psycholinguistics and language revitalization. In phonetics and psycholinguistics, She focuses on reduced, conversational, casual speech. She is interested in how much variability there is in the ways we produce and reduce or omit sounds, and in how listeners manage to understand speech despite that variability. How can a speaker decide to pronounce "but I was like..." as [brʌʒləiʔ], and how can a listener still find it completely intelligible? In language revitalization, She works with the Mutsun Amah Tribal Band of California. Mutsun hasn't had a native speaker since 1930, but there are huge quantities of written documentation on microfilm, and an active revitalization movement in the community. We work on analyzing the written data, writing language teaching materials, and spreading the language in the modern community.

Alumni

Sonya Bird completed her dissertation, “Phonetics and Phonology of Intervocalic Consonants of Lheidli,” in 2002. Sonya performed extensive acoustic analysis of Lheidli, an endangered Native American language spoken in British Columbia . She is a faculty member at the University of Victoria, where she is working on timing properties of doubly articulated sounds in Dakelh and St’at’imcets as well as other topics.

Lynnika Butler has carried out analysis of Japanese intonation in various speech styles for the lab’s project on the relationship between intonation and speech segmentation. She is currently investigating the role of literacy in phonological representation. She is also working on the Mutsun database project. Lynnika is now the language program coordinator for the Wiyot Tribe in California.

Rachel Hayes-Harb completed her dissertation in the SPAM lab and the Douglass Phonetics lab in 2003 with work on acquisition of second language phonological categories. She is a faculty member at the University of Utah.

Cathy Hicks Kennard (2006) completed her dissertation on the ways female and male drill instructors use their voices to convey authority as drill instructors. She is a faculty member at Central Michigan University.

Keith Johnson (2007) is investigating second language acquisition of the Spanish trill, using both acoustic and aerodynamic methods. Keith is a faculty member at California State University, Fresno.

Kyoko Masuda works on Japanese speakers’ acquisition of the r/l contrast. Kyoko is a graduate of the SLAT Program, and is a faculty member at Georgia Tech.

Yuka Matsugu performed acoustic analyses for a project on the realization of fricatives and affricates in Japanese. She also studied the production of Japanese semivowels, /y/ and /w/, which is published in 2008 (co-authored with Timothy J. Vance). Click here to download.

Naomi Ogasawara (2007) is working on psycholinguistic processing of Japanese devoiced or deleted vowels. Naomi completed her Ph.D. in linguistics in 2007 and is now a faculty member at National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei.

Natalya Samokhina is investigating phonetics and phonology of voicing assimilation in consonant clusters in Russian native and non-native speech. She is a PhD candidate in the SLAT program. Natalya is a pre-doctoral fellow at Trinity College, Connecticut.

Benjamin V. Tucker (2007) is interested in fine phonetic detail and the production and processing of spontaneous speech. He is also working on documenting and describing the phonetics and phonologies of two highly endangered languages, Chemehuevi and Mohave. Ben is a faculty member of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Alberta.

Heather Van Volkinburg worked as an Undergraduate Research Assistant on the Mutsun database project. She graduated from the University of Arizona with a BA in Linguistics in 2008. She is currently pursuing a PhD in Psychology at Columbia University studying temporal information processing. She is interested in the cognitive and neurological aspects underlying the perception of time and the relationship between timing and other cognitive mechanisms.

 

 

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