At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Massimo Lipari will be presenting The cross-linguistic acoustic space of fricatives.

When:
Tuesday, February 6, 15:00–16:00 (Montréal time, UTC-5)
Where:
MCQLL meetings this semester are in hybrid format. We will meet in-person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics Department, 1085 Dr-Penfield. If you’d like to attend virtually, the Zoom link is here.

All are welcome to attend.

  • Speaker:
    Massimo Lipari
    Title:
    The cross-linguistic acoustic space of fricatives
    Abstract:

    The acoustic study of fricatives presents three major challenges. First, which acoustic dimensions best capture the space that fricatives lie in is an open question (unlike for, e.g., vowels, where the relationship between formants and vowel quality is well understood). Second, while most existing work has been conducted on English, important differences between languages in the implementation of a “same” fricative have been noted in the few existing cross-linguistic studies. Third, the spectral properties of fricatives are known to vary throughout their articulation, and yet most rely entirely on static measures. This talk presents these problems in more detail and discusses potential solutions, which will inform future work–a large-scale, cross-linguistic corpus study of fricative acoustics.