CBS Departmental Seminar on 5 June 2009
Title: English Word Stress and Vowel Reduction Revisited: From the Perspective of Corpus Phonetics
Speaker: Dr. Jiahong Yuan, Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
Date: June 5, 2009 (Friday)
Time: 4:30pm – 6:00pm
Venue: AG 507, Department of Chinese and Bilingual Studies, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Abstract:
The field of phonetics has experienced two revolutions in the last century: the advent of the sound spectrograph in the 1950s and the application of computers beginning in the 1970s. Today, advances in networking, computation and mass storage are driving a third revolution: a movement from the study of small, individual datasets to the analysis of large published corpora. In this talk, I will present a study of English word stress and vowel reduction based on a large speech corpus. The study found that pitch and duration play different roles in distinguishing word stress. In the case of pitch, primary-stress vowels were different from secondary-stress and unstressed vowels; in the case of duration, unstressed vowels were different from the other two types of vowels. The study also demonstrated that lack of stress is not a sufficient condition for vowel reduction.
About the speaker:
Jiahong Yuan is Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He received a B.A. in Chinese languages and an M.A. in linguistics from Peking University, and a Ph.D. in linguistics from Cornell University. His research interests include speech prosody, corpus phonetics, and integration of speech technology in phonetics research.
