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Prof. Chang will be in Porto Alegre, Brazil next week to give a short course on language attrition at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) and a plenary address at the 5th International Conference on Language Attrition and Bilingualism (ICLA 5)! The title of his plenary is “Drift and attrition as a laboratory for testing perception–production links”.
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PhD student Meixian Li, along with Profs. Yao and Chang, published a new paper entitled “A corpus-based study of creaky voice production in English and Mandarin” in the Proceedings of Interspeech 2026!
Abstract: Creaky voice has been extensively examined across varieties of English, but cross-linguistic sociophonetic research on it remains limited. This study presents an acoustic investigation of creaky voice production in Mandarin Chinese and US English, using read-speech corpora comprising 66 Mandarin speakers (34F) and 61 English speakers (28F). Audios were processed via a pipeline of segmentation, annotation, cleaning, and acoustic analysis. 5,874 vowel tokens were measured for F0, H1–H2c, HNR35, and CPP over the 70% mid-portion. Linear mixed-effects analyses revealed men produced creakier speech than women in both languages. Findings contradict the notion that creaky voice is predominantly a feature of young women’s speech in US English but align with findings of more creakiness in men’s speech. We discuss the Mandarin results in relation to recent work on Mandarin listeners’ social perception of creaky voice.
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Prof. Chang will be representing the lab at the upcoming Interspeech 2026 conference in Sydney!
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Congratulations to Jupitara Ray on successfully defending her dissertation, “Phonetic plasticity in Indian English bilinguals: How L2 accommodation alters L1 production and perception”!
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Lab alum Dr. Felix Kpogo and Prof. Chang just published a new open-access article entitled “Age, gender, and locality effects on innovation in the Twi vowel harmony system” in Language Variation and Change!
Abstract: In this study, we explored social predictors of an ongoing sound change in the Twi Advanced Tongue Root (ATR) harmony system by acoustically examining production variation in a sample of 105 speakers representing urban and traditional localities in Ghana. In the urban locality, the change was evident in all age groups and near completion in the youngest generation. In the traditional locality, by contrast, the change was evident only in some younger speakers. The effect of gender differed between localities: urban men were more advanced in the change than urban women, whereas traditional speakers showing the change were predominantly women. By reflecting the gender dynamics of societal engagement and contact in Ghana, these findings highlight the importance of local social context for the manifestation of variation and the unique insights of non-Western communities for sociolinguistic theory.
