Research

For a full list of publications and presentations, see my UTA Research Profile or my CV.

Perceptual normalization in phonetic convergence

Previous work has shown that people unconsciously adjust their speech in the direction of speech they hear. We know less about how convergence interacts with perceptual normalization, the process by which listeners identify sounds across talkers with varying acoustics. In other words, do people imitate how someone is speaking or the raw acoustic properties of their voice? This has implications for theories of perceptual normalization, working memory, and cognitive representations of speech sounds. Results may also have applied implications for language teaching and clinical speech therapy as they could indicate a benefit to hearing pronunciations from a speaker who has a similar voice to the learner/patient

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Merger and assimilation in Mandarin sibilants

 

Many varieties of Mandarin exhibit a three-way place contrast among sibilants: alveolar, retroflex, and alveopalatal. Some varieties, notably Taiwan Mandarin, merge the alveolar and retroflex in at least some contexts. Right now I am working on two main questions about these contrasts:

  1. What is the nature of the vowels that follow alveopalatal [ɕ]?
    • AMP proceedings paper: “Coarticulation with alveopalatal sibilants in Mandarin and Polish: Phonetics or phonology?” Supplemental proceedings of the Annual Meeting on Phonology 2019. [link]
  2. How does the alveolar-retroflex merger affect the realization of the alveopalatal sibilant?

Relationship between phonological contrast and phonetic variability

I am interested in how extent of phonetic variation differs across languages according to how phonological contrasts are implemented. I look at how speakers constrain variation in the presence of contrast and allow variation in its absence. My work in this area is comparative and I have obtained data from speakers of Hindi, English, French, Polish, and Mandarin.

Related output:

  • Hauser, Ivy. 2021. “Contrast implementation affects phonetic variability: A case study of Hindi and English stops.” Laboratory Phonology 12(1). [published online]
  • “Phones in larger inventories are not (necessarily) less variable.” Invited talk at the Acoustic Society of America special session Ideas worth reconsidering in speech perception and production, manuscript in preparation for submission to corresponding JASA special issue.
  • “Intraspeaker variation and cue weight in Mandarin sibilants.” Talks at the 2020 Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting and 2020 meeting on Laboratory Phonology.
  • “Effects of phonological contrast on within-category phonetic variation.” Doctoral dissertation.
  • “A revised metric for calculating acoustic dispersion applied to stop inventories.” Paper in The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Express Letters. Poster from the June 2017 Meeting of the ASA.

Language-specific constraints for analyzing opacity

In joint work with Coral Hughto (Assurance IQ), we developed an analysis of phonological opacity which is entirely based on faithfulness constraints. We argue that these constraints are language-specific (not universal) and are currently working on implementing an induction algorithm which will learn the specific constraint when presented with opaque data.

Related output: