Amanda Miller's Website
Research
My research generally focuses on the interaction between phonetics and phonology,
especially in African Languages. My dissertation research focused on the
acoustics and phonotactics of Ju|'hoansi guttural consonants and vowels. The
Acoustic case study showed the voice quality cues associated with guttural
consonants and vowels are the acoustic bases of the Guttural OCP constraint
found in the language.
Another focus of my research is the
articulatory properties of two classes of click consonants, those that involve
tongue root retraction and those that do not. Ultrasound studies on these
clicks in N|uu have shown that tongue body shape and tongue root shape are
important to this contrast. I have also studied a class of clicks that were
previously thought to illustrate a contrast in the posterior constriction. My
studies have shown that they do not contrast in posterior place of
articulation. I have analyzed these segments as airstream contours, a new type
of segment. My research on the endangered Southern African language N|uu,
undertaken in collaboration with Bonny Sands and Johanna Brugman under the auspices of my
NSF grant, has described the entire inventory of 103 N|uu
sounds.
I have developed the CHAUSA (Corrected High frame rateAnchored
Ultrasound with Software Alignment) method that is capable of recording
images of the majority of the tongue at frame rates of 125 fps and higher. The
method allows quantitative comparison of dynamic sounds like complex
consonants. I am currently working on quantitative analysis of Mangetti Dune
!Xung clicks. Current research has shown that the rarefaction gestures in
different click types differ. Those that do not co-occur with front vowels
involve tongue root retraction, while those that do involve a greater degree of
tongue center lowering, and no tongue dorsum and tongue root retraction.
Teaching
I have
taught both undergraduate and graduate level courses in phonetics, field
methods, and graduate level seminars at Cornell University, the University of
British Columbia, and The Ohio State University. I have taught seminars on The
Acoustics of Voice Quality, Feature theory and the mapping between phonetic
attributes and phonological features (co-taught with Bruce Moren), and Speech
sounds: their phonetic variability and phonologicalorganization (co-taught with
Draga Zec) at Cornell University, as well as a seminar on The Phonetics of
African languages at the University of British Columbia. In the spring
quarter 2011, I taught a seminar on Articulatory Field Methods at
The Ohio State University.
I have
taught Field Methods on Khoekhoe(co-taught with Chris Collins), and Kabyle
Berber (co-taught with Franca Ferrari).
My
graduate student, Johanna Brugman, completed her thesis on Khoekhoe phonetics
and phonology, called "Segments,tones
and distribution in Khoekhoe prosody", in 2009.
Selected Publications
Miller A. (2011).The Representation
of ClicksIn Marc van Oostendorp, Colin Ewen, Elizabeth Hume, and Keren
Rice, eds.Companion to
PhonologyWiley-Blackwell.
Miller, A. and Finch,K. (2011) Corrected
High frame rate Anchored Ultrasound with Software Alignment.
Miller,A. (2010). Tongue Body and
Tongue Root Shape Differences in N|uu clicks Correlate with Phonotactic
Patterns In Suzanne Fuchs, Martine Toda and Marzena Zygis, Eds.Turbulent
Sounds: An Interdisciplinary Guide, Interface Explorations, : Mouton de
Gruyter.
Miller, A. (2010). A
prosodic account of Ju|'hoansi consonant distributional
asymmetries. In Khoisan Languages and
Linguistics: Proceedings of the 1st International Symposium January 4-8, 2003,
Riezlern/Kleinwalsertal (Brenzinger, M. and Konig, C., Eds.), Koeln:
Ruediger Koeppe Verlag, 40-73.
Miller, A., Brugman, J., Sands, B.,
Namaseb, L., Exter, M., and Collins, C. (2009).Differences
in Airstream and Posterior Place of Articulation among N|uu Lingual Stops. Journal
of the International Phonetic Association 39.2., 129-161. Click here to
hear the 103
Sounds of N|uu
Miller, A., Scott, A., Sands, B. and
Shah, S. (2009).Rarefaction
Gestures and Coarticulation in Mangetti Dune !Xung clicks. In M.
Uther, R. Moore & S. Cox, Eds., Proceedings of the 10th Annual
Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech
2009). Causal Productions: Brighton, U.K, Pp. 2279-2282.
Miller, A. and Shah,
S. (2009) The
Acoustics of Mangetti Dune !Xung Clicks In M. Uther, R. Moore & S. Cox,
Eds.,Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the
International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009). Causal
Productions: Brighton, U.K., Pp. 2283-2286.
Hudu, F. Miller, A. and Pulleyblank,
D. (2009).
Ultrasound imaging and theories of tongue root phenomena in African languagesProceedings
of the Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2. P.
Austin, O. Bond, M. Charette, D. Nathan and P. Sells, Eds. SOAS: London, Pp.
153-163.
Miller, A. (2008). Click Cavity Formation
and Dissolution in IsiXhosa: Viewing Clicks with High-Speed Ultrasound. In
Sock, R., Fuchs, S. & Y. Laprie, Eds., Proceedings of the 8th
International Seminar on Speech Production, December 2008, pp. 137-140.
Miller, A.,Brugman, J., Sands, B.,
Namaseb, L., Exter, M. and Collins, C. (2007). The Sounds of
N|uu: Place and Airstream Contrasts. In Lee, H.S. and Pittyaporn, P., Eds.,
Working papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 19.
Miller,A. L. (2007). Guttural vowels and
guttural co-articulation in Ju|'hoansi. Journal of Phonetics 35,
56-84.
Miller, A., Namaseb,
L., and Iskarous, K. (2007).
Tongue Body constriction differences in click types. In J. Cole and J.
Haulde, Eds., Laboratory Phonology 9, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 643-656.
Miller, A. and Zec.
(2003).
Acoustics of contrastive palatal affricates predicts phonological patterningProceedings
of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences
(Trouvain, J and Barry, W., Eds.), Pirrot GmbH, Dudweiler, Germany, 769-772.
Miller, A. (2003). The Phonetics and
Phonology of Gutturals: A Case study from Ju|'hoansi, Outstanding
Dissertations in Linguistics Series (Laurence Horn, Ed.), New York: Routledge.
Miller-Ockhuizen,A. (2001). Contrastive
Vowel Length and Variable Weight Reduplicative Templates in Ju|'hoansi.
Cornell Working Papers 18: Khoesan. Ithaca, NY, Pp. 261-276.
Miller-Ockhuizen, A. (2001). Two
Kinds of Reduplication in Ju|'hoansi In AAP 66, Ed. Akindele, F. and
Legere, K., pp. 107-118.
Miller-Ockhuizen, A (1999).C-V
Coarticulation and Complex Consonants: Evidence for Ordering in click place
gestures. In Fujimura, Osamu, Brian Joseph and Bohumil Polek, Eds. Proceedings
of LP '98: Item Order in Language and Speech. Prague: Charles University Press.
Miller-Ockhuizen, A. (1999). Reduplication
in Ju|'hoansi: Tone determines weight. In Tamanji, P., Hirotani, M. and
Hall, N. Eds. Proceedings of NELS 29, Volume One. Amherst: Graduate Linguistics
Student Association.
Miller-Ockhuizen, A. (1998). Towards a
Unified Decompositional Analysis of Khoisan Lexical Tone. In Schladt, Mathias,
Ed. Language,
Identity and Conceptualization among the Khoisan.Cologne: Rudiger Koppe
Verlag, pp. 217-244.