Byron Ahn (Ph.D. 2015) and Laura Kalin (Ph.D. 2014) have both accepted tenure-track positions in linguistics at Princeton University. Byron is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Swarthmore College, while Laura is currently a post-doctoral fellow at UConn. They will be joining former department visitor Florian Lionnet (UC Berkeley) as new faculty in the department.
Congratulations Byron and Laura!
Pat Keating appears in an article covering what is”vocal fry” and who use it.
An open letter Sameer Ud Dowla Khan (PhD 2008, now at Reed) wrote to NPR Show “Fresh Air” was mentioned in an article on self-identity and the style of language one uses to express their identity.
Eleanor Glewwe (3rd year) and Isabelle Lin (2nd year) were asked by the artist Glenn Kaino to create a dialect of French that would have developed on the moon, had France colonized the moon in the 16th century. The article talks about Kaino’s exhibit at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.
The quadrennial International Congress of Phonetic Sciences took place in Glasgow, Scotland in early August. UCLA had a strong showing with both current and former members in attendance. The UCLA Phonetics Lab reunion, organized by lab director, Pat Keating, was attended by over 30 current members and alumni.
Pat Keating was also inaugurated as the next president of the International Phonetic Association, becoming the 2nd UCLA phonetician to hold this post and the first woman to do so in the association’s 129-year history. In her inaugural address she laid out plans for the IPA to become a major resource for phonetics education as well as research. Here’s a photo of Pat receiving the handshake of outgoing IPA president John Esling.
Bruce Hayes and Sun-Ah Jun each gave a talk as a Keynote speaker at the joint meeting of ICPP 2015 (International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology 2015) and TaLK (Theoretical Linguistics at Keio) in Tokyo, Japan, in September 25-27, 2015 (http://pj.ninjal.ac.jp/phonology/IntlConference/14_icpp_2015/14_icpp_2015/)
Their talk titles are:
Sun-Ah Jun: “Interactions between word prosody, prominence type, and macro-rhythm”
Bruce Hayes: “Learning-theoretic generative phonetics with maxent: a Hausa example”
The full program of the conference is in http://pj.ninjal.ac.jp/phonology/IntlConference/14_icpp_2015/03_program/
Ann Aly was also a recipient of a Gosta Bruce scholarship to attend the meeting.
Sun-Ah Jun was also a co-organizer of a satellite meeting on the development of an International Prosodic Alphabet. More details can be found here.
See below for talks and posters by current (and some more recent) members of the lab and you can find the full abstract book here.
Talks:
Adam Chong & James Sneed German (Aix-Marseille Université, LPL, CNRS). Prosodic phrasing and F0 in Singapore English.
Snezhina Dimitrova & Sun-Ah Jun. Pitch accent variability in focus production and perception in Bulgarian declaratives.
Megha Sundara, Monika Molnar (BCBL, Spain) & Sonia Frota (Lisbon). The perception of boundary tones in infancy.
Posters:
Ann Aly. The multiple prosodic cues differentiating questions and statements in Miami Cuban Spanish.
Jason Bishop (Ph.D. 2013, now at CUNY-CSI/GC), Adam Chong & Sun-Ah Jun. Individual differences in prosodic strategies to sentence parsing.
Robert Daland & Yun Jung Kim (Ph.D. 2015, now at Emory). It is easier to learn the meaning of forms with a canonical stress pattern.
Pat Keating, Marc Garellek (Ph.D. 2013, now at UCSD) & Jody Kreiman (UCLA Head/Neck surgery). Acoustic properties of different kinds of creaky voice.
Kie Zuraw & Sharon Peperkamp (LSCP, CNRS). Aspiration and the gradient structure of English pre-fixed words.
Here are some photos of UCLA lab members from the UCLA reunion at Shandon Belles. Many thanks to Pat Keating for organizing! (courtesy of Kuniko Nielsen ’08):
Pat Keating has been elected the next president of the International Phonetic Association; she will take office in August at the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, and will serve until August 2019. The IPA was founded in 1886, and is the oldest professional organization for phonetics. Pat follows two previous IPA presidents from UCLA – Peter Ladefoged (UCLA professor 1962-2006) and John Ohala (Ph.D. 1969) – and is the first woman president.
A nice article featuring work by Pam Munro:
From Pam:
And if any of you use Facebook, please visit (and like!) the Tongva Language page!…
Sandy Disner (Ph.D. 1983; now at USC) was interviewed on CNN Newsroom yesterday in relation to the current news story regarding former American P.O.W. Bowe Bergdahl’s potential language attrition. Click here to watch the interview.
UCLA Linguistics Blog 