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ELIZABETH (Beth) HUME
Professor & Chair, Linguistics Buckeye Language Network Buckeye Speech Corpus Curriculum Vitae Metathesis Website Phonies Teaching |
Contact Info: Ohio State University Dept. of Linguistics 222 Oxley Hall Columbus, OH 43210 Dept. phone: (614) 292-4052 Dept. fax: (614) 292-8833 e-h-u-m-e@ling.osu.edu (remove hyphens to send me mail) |
Research interests: language sound systems, cognitive science, language variation and change
Current research projects:
Sound systems and the psychology of expectation: At the present time, my research focus is on understanding the role of expectation in language, calculated in terms of probability, and determined by a language user's experience with language(s). Expectation is providing some nice insights into markedness (e.g. universals), the topic of a book I'm currently working on. Essentially, I argue that the various diagnostics that we have been using (sometimes unsuccessfully) to predict markedness values are actually providing evidence for the cognitive function, expectation. Expectation is thus the cognitive basis of markedness.
Maltese vowel duration: The voiced pharyngeal consonant, historically present in Maltese, has varying realizations in the contemporary language. The realization of interest in this study is vowel duration. Sandra Vella (Malta), Ray Fabri (Malta), Adam Ussishkin (Arizona) and I are extending my earlier study with Jennifer Venditti to take advantage of Malta's rich dialectal landscape. We are investigating vowel duration in four dialects and from many angles including phonetic, phonological, sociolinguistic and historical.