Graduate student Yaqian Huang, a PhD candidate in our department, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant (Ling-DDRI, with Prof. Marc Garellek) for the project “Phonetics of period doubling.” The goal of the project is to study the production and perception of period doubling, an irregular voice quality with more than one pitch. Yaqian will characterize the articulatory and acoustic properties of period doubling, and determine how it affects pitch and tone perception.

Nina Semushina successfully defended her dissertation “The linguistic representation of number: Cross-linguistic and cross-modal perspectives” on August 20, 2021. She started a post-doc at the University of Chicago with Susan Goldin-Meadow and R. Breckie Church, investigating the effectiveness of teaching methods that incorporate gesture or spatial highlighting tools for math learning in hearing and deaf children and adults.

Graduate student JJ Lim has a new paper in English Language & Linguistics, titled “Ethnic and gender variation in the use of Colloquial Singapore English discourse particles,” with co-authors Jakob Leimgruber, Wilkinson Gonzales and Mie Hiramoto.

Graduate student Nina Hagen Kaldhol has been awarded a $20,000 Graduate Study and Research Scholarship for 2020-21 by the American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF) in collaboration with the Norway-America Association (NORAM). Congratulations, Nina!

Graduate student Michael Obiri-Yeboah was awarded a $43,000 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship for 2020-21 for his dissertation on the phonetics and phonology of Gua. This is a very prestigious and highly competitive fellowship: only 6% of the applications are funded. Congratulations, Michael!

Graduate student Nina Hagen Kaldhol was awarded a Friends of the International Center fellowship for her research on Somali and her contributions to promoting international friendship, understanding and community at UC San Diego. Congratulations, Nina!

Graduate student Catherine Arnett has been awarded a UC San Diego Friends of the International Center summer grant to conduct research on Zhoushanese, a Chinese dialect. Congratulations, Catherine!

Graduate student Yaqian Huang just published a paper entitled “Different attributes of creaky voice distinctly affect Mandarin tonal perception” in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 147(3): 1441-1458. The abstract is below. Congratulations, Yaqian!

Abstract. Previous work has shown mixed findings concerning the role of voice quality cues in Mandarin tones, with some studies showing that creak improves identification. This study tests the linguistic importance of acoustic properties of creak for Mandarin tone perception. Mandarin speakers identified tones with four resynthesized creak manipulations: low spectral tilt, irregular F0, period doubling, and extra-low F0. Two experiments with three conditions were conducted. In Experiment 1, the manipulations were confined to a portion of the stimuli’s duration; in Experiment 2 the creak manipulations were modified and lengthened throughout the stimuli, and in a second condition, noise was incorporated to weaken F0 cues. Listeners remained most sensitive to extra-low F0, which affected identification of the four tones differently: it improved the identification accuracy of Tone 3 and hindered that of Tones 1 and 4. Irregular F0 consistently hindered T1 identification. The effects of irregular F0, period doubling, and low spectral tilt emerged in Experiment 2, where F0 cues were less robust and creak cues were stronger. Thus, low F0 is the most prominent cue used in Mandarin tone identification, but other voice quality cues become more salient to listeners when the F0 cues are less retrievable.

The New York Times has a piece on implicit gender bias in politics, highlighting research co-authored by graduate student Till Poppels (as well as adjunct professor Roger Levy). You can read the paper itself here. Congratulations, Till!