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DTSTAMP:20261112T085522
DTSTART;TZID=America/Detroit:20261204T160000
DTEND;TZID=America/Detroit:20261204T173000
SUMMARY:Lecture / Discussion:Linguistics Graduate Student Colloquium
DESCRIPTION:Join us for a colloquium presented by Anna Whitney and Jungyun Seo in North Quad 2435 on Friday\, December 4\, 2026\, from 4-5:30 PM!\n\nAnna's Title:  Can You Hear Your Hometown?: Perception and Production of Pharyngealization in Dearborn English\n\nAnna's Abstract: In Dearborn\, MI\, English and Arabic have been in contact for more than one hundred years. As the community has grown to become the first and largest Arab-majority city in the U.S.\, it has also become a symbol of American Arabness and Islam\, and the variety spoken there has become distinct. The distinctive property that my research examines is pharyngealization of /aɪ/\, especially before voiceless consonants\, so that the diphthong in\, for example\, heights but not hides is produced with a pharyngeal constriction\, likely borrowed from Arabic (and possibly layered over the widespread phenomenon of Canadian Raising\, which occurs in similar phonetic contexts). Production and perception vary widely across community members\, and this talk asks what that variation means to the people who produce and hear it. The first part of this talk explores 30 sociolinguistic interviews with Dearborn residents. I annotated each interview for topic\, evaluative valence\, epistemic stance\, and claims about what Dearborn English is. I trace how residents talk about the way Dearborn English sounds\, and which aspects of that variation they treat as meaningful. Some participants explicitly recognize pharyngealization as a marker of a Dearborn way of speaking\, link it to particular kinds of people\, and even imitate it during the interview. Others describe the same speech and hesitate to identify a “Dearborn accent\,” let alone this specific feature — especially if they are a recent arrival or they live in Dearborn Heights. Drawing on indexical order and indexical fields\, I argue that pharyngealization can carry different kinds of social meaning for different members of the community. The second part of this talk introduces an audio-visual eye-tracking experiment designed to test Dearborn listeners' perceptual sensitivity to pharyngealization in relation to its social meaning. Dearborn listeners hear hides/heights-type minimal pairs with different degrees of pharyngealization\; the research question is whether more pharyngealization facilitates (speeds up) looks to heights (rather than hides). Preliminary results point to individual differences: some listeners were more accurate when pharyngealization was present\, while others were not. I close by discussing how linking these perceptual differences to listeners’ production and positionality could connect what people say about Dearborn English with how they actually perceive it.\n\nJungyun's Title: Prosodic structure and speech planning: Articulatory and acoustic patterns at prosodic boundaries\n\nJungyun's Abstract: In this talk I examine how different cognitive processes (linguistic structure and speech planning) are reflected in speech. Prosodic structure refers to the suprasegmental organization of language and groups words into larger units (prosodic phrases) which are marked with boundaries. At boundaries\, words are produced with longer duration (final lengthening)\, pitch modulation (boundary tones)\, and often pauses. The occurrence and duration of pauses is also affected by speech planning\, such that pause duration accommodates the planning time for an upcoming chunk of speech. But some studies have shown that words before pauses inserted for planning do not show temporal properties of typical prosodic boundaries. In three studies\, I examine the effect of planning on the acoustic (tonal) and kinematic (temporal) properties of prosodic boundaries. The first part of the presentation introduces experiments that test how the production of prosodic boundaries is influenced by speech planning. More specifically\, the question is whether prosodic boundaries remain prosodic boundaries under an increase in higher planning load or whether there are two different types of boundaries: structural boundaries (prosodic phrase boundaries motivated by prosodic structure) and planning boundaries (boundaries motivated by the need to accommodate time to plan an upcoming chunk of speech). Planning was operationalized in these studies as the selection of one lexical item from possible candidates and in this way activated lexical selection. The second part of the presentation examines the interaction of planning and syntactic structure in the production of boundaries. Prosodic phrase boundaries are often motivated by syntactic structure and typically occur at strong syntactic boundaries. I examine to what extent planning can determine prosodic boundary occurrence independently of syntactic structure. The effect of planning will be compared at different locations\, varying where prosodic boundaries get more support (at strong syntactic boundaries) or less support from syntactic structure (at weak syntactic boundaries). The question examined here is how prosodic boundaries are used in speech planning and whether and how the effect of planning varies under different linguistic contexts. I discuss how these studies inform our understanding of the relationship between planning and linguistic structure.
UID:154837-21918403@events.umich.edu
URL:https://events.umich.edu/event/154837
CLASS:PUBLIC
STATUS:CONFIRMED
CATEGORIES:Linguistics
LOCATION:North Quad - 2435
CONTACT:
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