The Department of Linguistics proudly presents Dr. Jeff Mielke, Professor at North Carolina State University.  Dr. Mielke will speak on "Covert and overt articulatory variation and their implications for phonology".

Large parts of phonological theory are meant to account for sound patterns that are frequently observed in spoken languages, and many of these sound patterns originate from articulatory variation. In this talk I will explore two cases of articulatory variation in spoken language. The first case is the covert variation in tongue shape, timing, and magnitude of American English /ɹ/, which has implications for the development of several phonological patterns, including /s/ retraction, /t d/ affrication, and crispy R. The second case is overt variation in vocal tract morphology among jaw surgery patients, something which has a large impact on the production of consonants. I will use these cases to help think about how formal properties of phonological patterns that linguists consider to be common are attributable to peculiarities of the vocal-auditory modality (as opposed to the visual-gestural modality of signed languages), and to explore the relationships between typical human vocal tracts and typical human speech sounds.

Funded in part by the GPSAFC and Open to the Graduate Community.