Wednesday, March 4, 2025
5:30 – 6:30pm
In Person at the Sound Studies Institute
3-47 Arts and Convocation Hall
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Voice quality is important not only in conveying indexical aspects of language, but also lexical information in languages that have tone and/or phonation contrasts (e.g., breathy, creaky vowels). The lower-level acoustic phonetic properties that are involved in manifesting such linguistic contrasts are also used as talker information, thus contributing to the different linguistic and social functions of voice quality. It is unclear whether and how people learn to use voice quality as contrastive categories apart from identifying talkers, and what cues of voice quality people use to perceive phonation and tone contrasts. This study contributes to understanding the different functions of voice quality as linguistic versus talker information, in particular the phonological use in forming sound categories.
Yaqian Huang is an Assistant Professor in Linguistics at U of Alberta and the director of Alberta Phonetics Lab. She is a linguist and cognitive scientist specializing in experimental phonetics, focusing on speech perception, production, and their relationship. She received her PhD in linguistics and cognitive sciences from UC San Diego, and did her postdoc at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She loves the interdisciplinary nature of speech and language, which has connections to many different fields including psychology, neuroscience, music, and engineering.
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