News

Phon Lab at the UCD Language Symposium

5/23/2019

Undergraduate Research Conference

5/7/2019

Congratulations to our RAs who presented at the 2019 UC Davis Undergraduate Research Conference!

Melina Sarian

Divine Otico

Cathryn Snyder

Marlene Andrade

Amazon Research Award | Georgia Zellou

4/11/2019

Congratulations!

Dr. Zellou was awarded a 2018 Amazon Faculty Research Award for her project, "Applying human “speech rules” to Alexa: Impact of acoustic-phonetic modifications on device engagement and perceived naturalness".

For more about the award, see: https://ara.amazon-ml.com/about/#faculty

5 Minute Linguist Competition Video

1/24/2019

See below for the recording for the 5 Minute Linguist (5ML) competition, emceed by John McWhorter, at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in New York City. The aim of the competition to communicate a research project to a general audience in just 5 minutes (and with no notes!).

We are thrilled that two talks selected as finalists were from our lab!

Talk 1 (0:00 - 8:22)
Michelle Cohn (University of California, Davis): Phonologically motivated phonetic repair strategies in Siri- and human-directed speech

Talk 2 (9:45 - 15:43)
Bruno Ferenc Segedin (University of California, Davis) & Georgia Zellou (University of California, Davis): Lexical frequency mediates compensation for coarticulation: Are the seeds of sound change word-specific?

Congratulations to the other presenters, as well!

Andrew Cheng (University of California, Berkeley): Style-shifting, Bilingualism, and the Koreatown Accent
Bruno Ferenc Segedin (University of California, Davis) & Georgia Zellou (University of California, Davis): Lexical frequency mediates compensation for coarticulation: Are the seeds of sound change word-specific?
Kristin Denlinger (University of Texas, Austin) & Michael Everdell (University of Texas, Austin): A Mereological Approach to Reduplicated Resultatives in O’dam
Jessi Grieser (University of Tennessee): Talking Place, Speaking Race: Topic-based style shifting in African American Language as an expression of place identity
Kate Mesh (University of Haifa): Gaze decouples from pointing as a result of grammaticalization: Evidence from Israeli Sign Language
Jennifer Schechter (University at Buffalo): What Donald Trump’s ‘thoughts’ reveal: An acoustic analysis of 45’s coffee vowel
Ai Taniguchi (Carleton University): Why we say stuff

Finalists for 5 Minute Linguist!

9/17/2018

We were thrilled to learn that two talks from our lab have been selected as finalists to compete in the 5 Minute Linguist (ML) competition at the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) meeting in 2019.

* Phonologically motivated phonetic repair strategies in Siri- and human-
directed speech. Presenter: Michelle Cohn
* Lexical frequency mediates compensation for coarticulation: Are the seeds of sound change
word-specific? Presenters: Bruno Ferenc Segedin & Georgia Zellou.

"The Five-Minute Linguist is a high-profile event which features eight LSA members giving lively and engaging presentations about their research in a manner accessible to the general public....These five-minute presentations will be judged by a panel of journalists as well as the audience itself, and a winner will be chosen at the end of the event.The goal of this event is to encourage LSA members to practice presenting their work to a broad audience and to showcase outstanding examples of members who can explain their research in an accessible way. [www.linguisticsociety.org/content/five-minute-linguist-2019]

Click here to see the official finalist announcement:
www.linguisticsociety.org/news/2018/09/24/2019-five-minute-linguist-finalists-announced

Presentations @ 2019 LSA and ADS

9/17/2018

We are excited to have several talks/posters at the upcoming Linguistic Society of America (LSA) and American Dialect Society (ADS) annual meetings in New York City this January.

Linguistic Society of America (LSA) Annual Meeting (New York City, NY)
* Santiago Barreda. A Theoretical and Statistical Investigation of Vowel Normalization Procedures
* Michelle Cohn, Bruno Ferenc Segedin, & Georgia Zellou. Phonologically motivated phonetic repair strategies in Siri- and human-directed speech
*Georgia Zellou & Bruno Ferenc Segedin. The distribution of phonetic variation influences patterns
of perceptual adaptation
* Santiago Barreda & Zoey Liu. The Effect of Linguistic Experience on the Perception of Talker
Height from Speech

2019 American Dialect Society (ADS) Annual Meeting (New York City, NY)
* Chloe Brotherton, Michelle Cohn, Georgia Zellou, Santiago Barreda. Regional Variation in Vowel Positioning and Diphthongization in TRAP Allophones in California

CALL for Undergrad Researchers:

9/11/2018

The Phonetics Lab in the Department of Linguistics at UC Davis is recruiting applications for undergraduate research assistant (RAs) positions for Fall 2018- Winter 2019 (with possibility of extension). RAs are expected to work approximately 6-8 hours a week in the lab and will receive 2 units of LIN 199 credit per quarter (4 units count as upper division elective toward LIN major).

RAs will

Get hands-on experience with running experiments in the lab
Schedule and run subjects independently
Use tools for automatic acoustic analysis
Use Praat to annotate / measure acoustic properties of speech data
Receive 2 units of 199 (Research) per quarter

Desired qualifications

Interest in research! (Prior experience not required)
Background in acoustic phonetics / linguistics

Application deadline: September 20, 2018

To apply, email the following to Dr. Michelle Cohn (mdcohn@ucdavis.edu)

CV / Resume
Unofficial academic transcripts
1-2 paragraph description of your interest in the RA position (why do you want to be an RA? Why do you think you'll be a good fit?)
Fall 2018 course schedule

How do people talk to Alexa?

7/15/2018

A team led by Georgia Zellou has begun a collaborative research effort exploring how people adjust their speech to digital devices, such as Siri or Alexa.

For example, recent Ph.D graduate, Michelle Cohn, has been recording conversations with Gunrock, a social bot created by Zhou Yu's lab that is currently in the semifinals for the Amazon Alexa Prize. You can talk to it yourself if you have an Alexa-enabled device: just say "Let's chat!" and it will randomly invoke one of the three social bots in the running for the grand prize.