Welcome back, everyone! The Linguistics Club has gotten off to a great start this year with a handsome bunch of fresh faces and a great line-up of fun events. I will post more about those later ("I" being your friendly neighborhood Linguistics Club president, Amy Hemmeter), but now I want to share the stories of some of our Linguistics concentrators and their exciting summers:
Linguistics major Andrea Hernandez Morales became certified to teach ESL, and boned up her skills teaching ESL to migrant workers in Adrian, Michigan. Way to put your knowledge of Linguistics to good use to help out a community in need!
Super-senior Tony Natoci spent his summer doing research and other tasks. In his own words:
--I began work on a paper with Sam Epstein that will expand on my 615 term paper from last winter term. In it we hope to expose an inconsistency between two well known (but not as of yet thought of as conflicting) theories of chain-based quantifier scope interpretation.
--I did the dirty work (experiment coding, some experimentation, stimulus/token production, other odds and ends) for Andries's nasal assimilation project. The research question being asked, in a nutshell, is whether or not listeners can perceptually compensate for nasal place assimilation in phrases like "aspirin powder," where the word-final nasal /n/ is often pronounced as [m] because of the following labial consonant. We are also manipulating the speech rate of the phrases being presented to the listener (increasing the speech of each phrase by 20-40%) to see if speech rate affects this perceptual process. Early returns on the data suggest that it does. YAY!
--I've also done a lot of work with ultrasound imaging. I helped Jon Yip, a third-year graduate student, align his ultrasound frames with their auditory counterparts, a time consuming but essential step, especially for Jon's project, which explores the timing of articulatory gestures in modern Greek. I've also been working for Andries and Pam on their own project involving ultrasound images of the tongue. My task here has been to draw point-by-point tongue contours with the help of the contouring program EdgeTrak. It's tedious work (as with all ultrasound research, as you may be gathering), but the ultimate reward - millisecond by millisecond data showing exactly where and how the tongue moves during speech - makes the process worthwhile.
Senior Emily Reimann also worked on research. She worked with Acrisio Pires on bilingualism and 2nd language acquisition experiments, scrambling, and wh-question constructions. As part of the job, she tutored a research assistant in basic syntax, and sat in on group research meetings. She recently headed to Turkey for a conference in Turkish linguistics to gather information for her honors thesis.
And finally, we have more research from senior Carl Veshka. Carl spent this Summer conducting research on syllable contact in Korean. In Korean, there is a syllabification process that results in a tautosyllabic consonant cluster onset in a succeeding syllable. Carl established that this type of syllabification occurs in Korean in order to satisfy proper syllable contact in Korean. He took this research a step further looking at the production of made-up [CVNGVC]- words (where N stands for nasal and G stands for glide) in Korean. In this study he set out to determine whether the nasal stop in [CV.NGVC]- words surfaced as an alveolar nasal stop or a palatal nasal stop. The study showed that nasal stops in [CV.NGVC]- indeed are palatal and not alveolar. Hypothesizing about why this place change occurs is still in progress.
Congratulations to all of our seniors who spent their summer doing something academic and productive. Keep up the good work!
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