Research in the Phonology Lab addresses the question of why phonological typology is the way it is.

As traditionally understood, explanations of typological generalizations usually appeal to principles thought of in a synchronic domain. However, any synchronic pattern must have a diachronic dimension, since that pattern had to come into being in some way. I believe that the diachronic and synchronic research programs of language share the same fundamental goals; that is, the "constraints" problem of determining possible and impossible changes and the synchronic question of determining possible and impossible human languages are essentially one and the same pursuit. Our research addresses the following issues:

What factors induce variations in the sound system that ultimately lead to change?

• Articulatory and perceptual information
• Social-indexical information
• Lexical statistical information

What is the architecture of the speech production and perceptual system?

• How are the factors encoded?
• How do the factors interact?
• How does sound change come about in such a system?

The methods we use to investigate these questions include behavioral methods, such as speech production and perception tasks, computational simulations, as well as statistical modeling.

Documentation of the Washo Language
(National Science Foundation Grant #0553675)

The Washo language, one of the most critically endangered and poorly documented of languages of North America, is now only used by a few elderly speakers who live in several townships near the California Nevada border southeast of Lake Tahoe. Washo is only minimally documented, with no comprehensive grammar or dictionary, except for William Jacobsen’s 1964 doctoral dissertation from the University of California, Berkeley, which contains mainly a phonological and morphosyntactic description of the language. The main objective of this project is a detailed study of the phonetics and phonology (at both the allophonic and morpho-phonological levels) of the Washo language since a solid understanding of the phonetics and phonology of the language is paramount to understanding the other components of the language (e.g., the morpho-syntax, syntax, and discourse). Another priority for this project is the creation of a web-accessible digital archive to make Washo data accessible to scholars and, of equal or greater importance, to the native community itself.

Publications:

• Yu, Alan C. L. To appear. The phonetics of quantity alternation in Washo. Journal of Phonetics.
• Yu, Alan C. L. 2006. Prosodically-conditioned segmental fission in Washo. In Rebecca Cover & Yumi Kim (eds.) The Proceedings of the 31st Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society. 513-524.
• Yu, Alan C. L. 2005 Quantity, stress, and reduplication in Washo. Phonology 22(3): 437-475.
• Patrick Midtlyng & Alan C. L. Yu. 2005. Phonetic structures of Washo. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 117, 2490.
• Midtlyng, Patrick. 2005. Washo Morphophonology: Hiatus resolution at the edges –or- Let them be vowels. In C. Jany and L Harper (eds.) Proceedings from the 8th Workshop on American Indigenous Langauges. Santa Barbara Working Papers in Linguistics 16: 50-62.

On-going projects:

• Laryngealized resonants in Washo (Robert Peachey & Alan Yu)
• The Interaction between stress assignment and suffix ordering in Washo (Eric Morley & Alan Yu)
• Pitch anchoring in Washo (Justin Murphy and Alan Yu)
• Switch reference marking in Washo (Kjersti Stensrud & Robert Peachey)