My work focuses on the relationship between the periphery and the core of languages’ sound systems. Natural language, as it is produced in audio corpora and in fieldwork contexts, is crucial to my research goals of understanding paraphonemic sounds and how these sounds are encoded and used by speakers.
Paraphonemic Sounds
Dissertation project using corpora and fieldwork methods to model acoustic properties of sounds used by speakers that are commonly part of speech but not typically considered to be sounds of a language. These sounds include verbal gestures such as clicks like tsk-tsk or tut-tut, taken from the Buckeye Corpus (Pitt, et al. 2007)
Papers & Presentations
Acoustic Properties of Para-Phonemic Sounds: Clicks in American English. 2019. 19th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Melbourne, Australia. Paper. Poster.
Clicks in American English: Understudied Aspects of Sound Systems. 2019. Phonatics Group. Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. Slides.
English Clicks: Individual Variation in Speech Preparation and Stance Display. 2018. New Ways of Analyzing Variation 47. New York University, New York, NY. Slides.
Paraphonemic Clicks: A Language Universal? Betsy Pillion and Jason Riggle. Workshop on the Emergence of Universals. The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. 18-19 February 2018. Slides.
Verbal gestures and secondary sounds: Cameroon and beyond. 2017. UChicago Linguistic Research Forum. Chinese University of Hong Kong. Poster.
Fieldwork in Cameroon
Research trip to Yaoundé, Buea and Apouh Angokh in collaboration with Lenore Grenoble, Emmanuelle Ngué Um, and Sarah Kopper.
- Analyzing syntactic patterns of Noun-Noun phrases and Property Concepts in Bulu
- Eliciting verbal gestures in speakers of Basaá, Bulu, and speakers of Cameroonian Pidgin English.
Papers and Presentations
Verbal Gestures in Cameroon. Betsy Pillion, Lenore Grenoble, Emmanuel Ngué Um, and Sarah Kopper. 2019. Proceedings of the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Language Sciences Press. Slides.
Verbal Gestures as a Cross-Linguistic Category. 2017. Lenore Grenoble, Sarah Kopper, Emmanuel Ngué Um, Betsy Pillion, Hanna Stenersen. 12th Meeting of the Association for Linguistic Typology. ANU, Canberra, Australia, 12-14 December 2017.
Property Concept Nominals in Bulu. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Paper.
SCorpus Project
Project looking at the speech of the Justices of the United States Supreme Court and the lawyers that present oral arguments to the court. Data comes from the Oyez audio archive. In collaboration with Alan C.L. Yu, Jacob Phillips, Carissa Abrego, and Katie Franich.
Papers and Presentations
Investigating variation in English vowel-to-vowel coarticulation in a longitudinal phonetic corpus. Alan Yu, Carissa Abrego-Collier, Jacob Phillips and Betsy Pillion. 2016. Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Paper.
The perils of sounding manly: A look at vocal characteristics of lawyers before the United States Supreme Court. 2014. Alan Yu, Daniel Chen, Kathryn Franich, Yosh Halberstam, Jacob Phillips, Betsy Pillion, Yiding Hao, and Zhigang Yin. 14th Conference on Laboratory Phonology. Tokyo, Japan.