MCQLL, 2/6 — Massimo Lipari 

At this week’s MCQLL meeting, 

Massimo Lipari will be presenting “The cross-linguistic acoustic space of fricatives”. Abstract below.

We will be meeting this Tuesday February 6 at 3:00PM. Meetings are held both in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom.

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.