CSULB Phonetics Lab
Current lab members
- Dr. Nancy Hall, Dept. of Linguistics
- Dr. Lei Sun, Dept. of Speech Language Pathology
- Vincent Miramontes-Andrade, BUILD student
- Barbara Rios-Garcia, UROP student
- Alondra Gonzalez, UROP student
- Jia Chen, volunteer
- Carissa Lam, volunteer
- Emy Nguyen, volunteer
- Liana Bozorgi, high school student
- Neel Byrappagari, high school student
- Rehan Babu, high school student
Eligible students can be employed in the lab through CSULB BUILD, CSULB McNair Scholars, CSULB UROP, or ORSP summer research assistantships. Alternatively, students can do research for elective course credit by registering for LING 499 or LING 597. Contact Dr. Hall if interested.
Current Projects
Development of liquid sounds in Spanish-English bilingual children
In collaboration with Dr. Lei Sun (CSULB Speech Pathology), we are studying bilingual children’s productions of ‘r’ and ‘l’ sounds in each language. These sounds are among the most difficult for children to pronounce, and bilingual children have the added challenge that English’s ‘r’ sound is phonetically different from the two ‘r’ sounds (tap and trill) of Spanish. Our study looks at the pronunciation of these sounds in a variety of matched phonetic environments, such as onset clusters, coda clusters, and syllabic position. We hope that the results will contribute to a better understanding of normal developmental patterns in bilingual children. Data collection began in Fall 2018. In 2019-2020, this research is supported by an ORSP Multidisciplinary Research Grant.
- Nancy Hall, Lei Sun, Bianca Godinez, Irene Orellana, Coleen Villegas, Megan Walsh. Production of liquid sounds by a typically developing Spanish-English simultaneous bilingual: A case study [poster]. 2019 Annual Convention, California Speech-Language-Hearing Association (CSHA). Pasadena, CA.
Dissimilation and long-range coarticulation
Americans tend to drop one ‘r’ from many words that contain two ‘r’s, such as su(r)prise, be(r)serk, temp(er)ature, tu(r)meric, and barbitu(r)ate. There is little agreement as to why this happens. We are exploring a theory that this r-dropping originates from listener errors.
- Nancy Hall, Bianca Godinez, Megan Walsh, Sarah Garcia, Araceli Carmona (2020). Perception of repeated /l/and /n/: Implications for understanding dissimilation. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, 2020. pp 446-459.
- Bianca Godinez, Megan Walsh, Sarah Garcia, Araceli Carmona, & Nancy Hall (2019). Experimental evidence for perceptual hypercorrection in American r-dissimilation. Poster at SoCal Hearing Conference, UC Irvine.
- Nancy Hall, Bianca Godinez, Megan Walsh (2019). Experimental evidence for perceptual hypercorrection in American r-dissimilation. Poster at Hanyang International Symposium on Phonetics and Cognitive Sciences of Language 2019 (HisPhonCog). Seoul, South Korea.
- Nancy Hall, Bianca Godinez, Megan Walsh, Irene Orellana, Coleen Villegas (2019). Evidence for perceptual hypercorrection in American r-dissimilation: A pilot study. Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America, [S.l.], v. 4, p. 52:1-12.
- Nancy Hall, Nancy Vasquez, Muhammad Damanhuri, Francisco Aguirre, Connor Tree (2017). Long-distance Liquid Coarticulation in American English. Proceedings of the Annual Meetings on Phonology 2016.
- Brianna Maloney, Louise Barbosa, Nancy Hall (2016). Long-range liquid coarticulation in American English: a preliminary study. Proceedings of the 30th Annual National Conference on Undergraduate Research (University of North Carolina Asheville)
- Nancy Hall (2012). Perceptual errors or deliberate avoidance? Types of English /r/-dissimilation. Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, February 8-10, 2008. pp. 133-144.
Analyzing archival recordings of Hocank
Hocank (Ho-Chunk, Hocak, Hoocąk) is a Siouan language spoken in Wisconsin and Nebraska. We are annotating and analyzing recordings made in 1974-1975 by the Wisconsin Native Languages Project. In 2017-2018, Elica Sue, Irene Orellana, Nancy Hall and Miles Haisley created Praat textgrids that mark the location of over 7,800 words and phrases in the recordings. Each word is phonetically transcribed. In 2018-2019, Cameron Duval, Andie Niederecker and Sean Panick began morpho-phonological analysis of complex noun and verb forms, and Molly Rosenfeld and Alejandra Juarez began orthographic transcription of English conversations between the linguist and Hocank speakers. Molly Rosenfeld and Coleen Villegas also began annotation of a set of recordings made by Gerd Fraenkel in 1959. Academic or tribal researchers interested in accessing any of these annotations should contact Nancy Hall.
- Nancy Hall & Brigid Shanley (to appear) Word-initial allophones of r in Ho-Chunk (to appear in The Proceedings of the 42st and 43rd Siouan and Caddoan Conferences)
- Andie Niederecker (2023) An Acoustic Study of Hoocąk Vowels [MA thesis]
- Sean Panick (2021) R-Nasalization in Hoocąk: a Diachronic and Synchronic Perspective [MA thesis]
- Sean Panick & Nancy Hall (2022) The evolution of flap-nasalization in Hoocąk. Linguistics Vanguard
- Andie Niederecker, Cameron Duval, & Nancy Hall (2019). Morpho-phonological annotation of an archival corpus of Hocank (Winnebago) [poster]. Southern California Annual Meeting on Phonology (SCAMP).
- Nancy Hall, Andie Niederecker, Elica Sue & Irene Orellana (2019). Annotating Archival Recordings of Hocank (Winnebago). In Katherine Hout, Anna Mai, Adam McCollum, Sharon Rose, Matthew Zaslansky (eds). Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Meeting on Phonology.
- Nancy Hall & Elica Sue. Hocank (Winnebago) vowel epenthesis: A phonological re-examination in light of phonetic data. Talk at the 15th Old World Conference in Phonology, University College London, January 2018.
- Molly Rosenfeld, Coleen Villegas & Nancy Hall (2018). The Fraenkel 1959 recordings: an unstudied corpus of Hocank. Poster presentation at the Southern California Annual Meeting on Phonology (SCAMP), University of Southern California, April 2018.
Arabic phonetics
- Nancy Hall (2019). Incomplete neutralization: What Arabic can bring to the debate. In Amel Khalfaoui & Youssef Haddad, eds, Perspectives on Arabic Linguistics XXXI. John Benjamins. (preprint available on request)
- Nancy Hall (2017). Phonetic neutralization in Palestinian Arabic vowel shortening, with implications for lexical organization. Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 2(1): 48. 1–23.
- Nancy Hall (2013). Acoustic differences between lexical and epenthetic vowels in Lebanese Arabic. Journal of Phonetics 41:2, pp 133-143.
Contact
Location: PSY 438
Phone: (562) 985-1898
Lab director e-mail: nancy.hall [at] csulb.edu
Lab e-mail (checked sporadically): CSULBPhoneticsLab [at] gmail.com
Past lab members
- Rochelle Vu, LAEP student
- Del Navarro, LAEP student
- Emiliano Benitez, BA student in Physics
- Ashley Harris, BA student in Speech Language Pathology
- Vivienne Nguyen, 2021 BA in Speech Language Pathology
- Karla Aguirre, MA student in Linguistics
- Sehar Alam (UROP 2020-2021)
- Araceli Carmona, BA Linguistics, CSULB BUILD
- Adrian Cortez, (UROP 2020-2021)
- Cameron Duval, Linguistics BA 2019; MA student in Linguistics, UC Davis
- Stephanie Flores (UROP 2020-2021)
- Michael Valentekovic, MA student in Linguistics
- Maria Bandala (UROP 2020)
- Lauren Bray
- Patricia Soto (2020 BA Speech Language Pathology)
- Bianca Godinez (BUILD 2018-2020; 2020 BA Linguistics; MA student in Computational Linguistics, U of Colorado)
- Sarah Garcia (BUILD 2019-2020; 2020 BA Speech-Language Pathology)
- Megan Walsh (BUILD 2018-2019; 2019 BA Speech-Language Pathology)
- Courtney Wilson (2020 BA Speech Language Pathology)
- Alejandra Juarez (UROP 2018-2018)
- Brianna Cabral (2019 BA Speech-Language Pathology)
- Andie Niederecker (2019 BA Linguistics; MA student in Linguistics)
- Coleen Villegas (BUILD 2016-2018; BA Speech-Language Pathology 2018)
- Nancy Vasquez (BUILD 2016-2018; BA Linguistics; masters student in Speech Language Pathology, Cal State East Bay)
- Irene Orellana (BUILD 2017-2018; MA in Forensic Linguistics, Hofstra University, 2021)
- Molly Rosenfeld (UROP 2017-2018)
- Jessica Terry (BUILD 2016-2017, BA Linguistics 2018, MS student in Speech Language Pathology, CSU San Marcos)
- Elica Sue (ORSP 2017 summer research fellow, MA 2018, PhD candidate UC Santa Barbara)
- Miles Haisley (2017 summer research fellow, MA 2018, ESL Coordinator at Long Beach Immigrant Rights Coalition)
- Francisco Aguirre (ORSP 2016 summer research fellow)
- Connor Tree (high school volunteer, summer 2016; BA University of Chicago)
- Muhammad Damanhuri (summer volunteer; BA)
- Marilyn Santana (UROP 2016-2017; MA student in Marriage and Family Counseling, Fresno State)
- Brianna Maloney (UROP 2015-2016)
- Louise Barbosa (UROP 2015-2016)
- Vanessa Conte Herse (2015 MA Linguistics)
- Samaneh Rouhi (2014 MA Linguistics)
- Jed Guevara-Pizarro (2020 PhD in Linguistics, UC Santa Cruz)
- Essa Al-Faifi (PhD student, University of Arizona)
- Daniel Landry (software engineer, Google)
- Hiroshi Kurakata (2012 BA Linguistics)
- Sean Panick (MA student in Linguistics)
- Inessa Udovchenko (2016 MA Linguistics)
- Jose Brassea (MA student in Linguistics)
- Sergio Sandoval
- Hind Algattan (2013 MA Linguistics)
- Nour Kweider (PhD student, Carnegie Mellon University)
- Alexandra Daher (2012 MA Education)
- Stacey Jacobson (2010 MA; PhD candidate, University of Alabama)
- Suzanne Yow (2008 MA Linguistics)
- Cynthia Azarcon (2009 MA Linguistics)
