Recent faculty publications in phonology and phonetics

The past year has seen a spate of faculty publications in phonology and phonetics. Two are a product of collaborations between Professors Ryan Bennett, Grant McGuire, and Jaye Padgett and co-authors. One, “Effects of syllable position and place of articulation on secondary dorsal contrasts: An ultrasound study of Irish” (Journal of Phonetics, vol. 107), co-authored with Jenny Bellik (PhD, 2019), shows that the Irish palatalization contrast is produced less robustly in syllable codas than in onsets, and more variably in labial consonants and in codas. These results are related to cross-linguistic asymmetries in the occurrence of a palatalization contrast. The second, “Russian palatalization is a matter of the tongue body” (Journal of Slavic Linguistics, vol. 32) argues what its title says and against alternative accounts that view the Russian contrast as primarily one involving pharyngealization or [ATR].

Jaye also saw another article come out over the past year, also a collaboration with co-authors. “An acoustic study of ATR in Tima vowels: Vowel quality, voice quality and duration” (Phonology, vol. 41, e2) provides an acoustic analysis of the ATR contrast in Tima, a very understudied language of Sudan, and shows that voice quality is implicated in the contrast along with the more familiar F1 differences.