This coming week, we have our next installment in the McGill Linguistics Colloquium series for the 2024-2025 academic year! The talk will be given by Eleanor Chodroff (University of Zurich) on Friday, January 31 at 3:30PM at Sherbrooke 680 in room 1041. The details of the talk are given below.

Title: Harnessing massively multilingual speech resources for phonetic typology

Abstract: In recent years, the availability and accessibility of crosslinguistic speech data has increased considerably, allowing corpus phonetics to become a viable method for insights into phonetic typology. In this talk, I discuss recent developments in the creation of large-scale crosslinguistic speech corpora and the theoretical insights these resources enable. In particular, I present findings on highly structured crosslinguistic speech patterns, with a primary focus on intrinsic vowel duration. I also discuss analytic factors that might account for such structure across a wide range of languages.

Eleanor is interested in meeting with students and faculty. If you would like to meet with Eleanor before the talk next Friday, please email Simon with your availability by Wednesday so that we can schedule accordingly.