Yuan Chai (Ph.D. 2022) and Marc Garellek have a new publication in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America entitled “On H1–H2 as an acoustic measure of linguistic phonation type”: https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0014175.

This paper, which is part of a special issue in JASA called “Reconsidering Classic Ideas in Speech Communication,” revisits the use of the acoustic measure H1–H2 for characterizing phonation types, and proposes a new measure that is argued to be better for measuring creaky voice in particular.

Graduate student Duk-Ho Jung and faculty member Grant Goodall have a new publication in Journal of Linguistics entitled “Filler–gap dependencies and the remnant–correlate dependency in backward sprouting: Sensitivity to distance and islands.” It is available open-access at https://www.doi.org/10.1017/S0022226722000366

The article examines “backward sprouting” (Although it is unclear what, Mary was drinking on the bus). Superficially, this structure looks very similar to filler-gap dependencies (It is unclear what Mary was drinking __ on the bus), but the article shows experimentally that there are actually some intriguing differences, with important implications for how sprouting structures are formed. The experiments in this article are part of Duk-Ho’s work for his forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation.

Faculty member Marc Garellek has a new publication in Journal of Phonetics, entitled “Theoretical achievements of phonetics in the 21st century: Phonetics of voice quality”: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wocn.2022.101155.

The paper reviews the developments in the phonetic study of voice quality over the last twenty years, and includes discussion of some of the research done by Marc Garellek and graduate students in the department.

Graduate student Ebru Evcen and the former faculty member Eva Wittenberg published the paper “Making Question under Discussion explicit shifts counterfactual interpretation” in Proceedings of the 44^th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Using eye-tracking data, the paper shows that comprehenders have tough time to think about the real world hearing a counterfactual utterance (e.g., If there had been zebras, then there would have been lions in the zoo) in general, but the absence of causal connection and well-defined QuD makes it even harder!

Ebru is presenting the paper in a short talk format (virtually) at the Annual Meeting of Cognitive Science Society (CogSci2022), which is held in Toronto, Canada on July 27-30, 2022.

Evcen, E., & Wittenberg, E. (2022). Making the Question Under Discussion explicit shifts counterfactual interpretation. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/43z0w42j

Have you ever been so flustered, amused, frustrated, or surprised that you… just… lkajhslkasdf?

Well, Allison Park sure has, and they’ve turned their experience with the online practice of keysmashing into a topic of serious linguistic study. In their recent paper ‘On the linguistic behavior of keysmashes’, Allison argues that keysmashes are fundamentally linguistic, behaving according to many of the normal criteria used for establishing that expression is ‘language’, like semanticity, standards of form, and arbitrariness. Then, Park goes on to evaluate the kinds of criteria which go into people’s judgements about whether a keysmash is ‘well formed’ and ‘acceptable’, finding that not only do keysmashes have to be the right length and have the right amount of repetition, but that the location on the keyboard of the characters used is crucial, along with other important characteristics.

For more information about this work, their findings, and the social, linguistic, and communicative goals of keysmashing, have a look at San Diego Linguistics Papers Issue 11 on eScholarship.

San Diego Linguistic Papers is the working papers archive of the Department of Linguistics at UC San Diego.

Graduate student Tory Sampson and faculty member Rachel Mayberry have a new publication in Language, titled “An Emerging SELF: The Copula Cycle in American Sign Language.” The abstract is as follows:

Graduate student Seoyeon Jang (first author) and faculty member Ivano Caponigro just published the paper “A Semantic Analysis for Korean Echo Questions” in Kaoru Horie, Kimi Akita, Yusuke Kubota, David Y. Oshima, and Akira Utsugi (eds), Proceedings of the Japanese-Korean Linguistics 29 Conference (JK29), pp. 165-179, Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2022.

Graduate student Nese Demir has a new publication titled “Laz Turkish: A case study in language contact and language change”. The paper is published in a special collection in Linguistics Vanguard devoted to sound change in endangered and small speech communities. 

Graduate student Anthony Struthers-Young has a new article in Frontiers in Communication, titled “A Preliminary Account of the Northern Toussian Balafon Surrogate Language.”
This paper documents the Northern Toussian musical surrogate language, which is a way of encoding speech with musical instruments.