Phonology Lab

The Phonology Lab, located in 46-57 Dwinelle Hall, is a teaching and research facility of the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley.

Our research focusses on documenting and explaining sound patterns in language. For example, Y.R. Chao (1930) invented a way of writing syllabic pitch shapes (principally for Chinese languages). The so-called 'Chao letters' are now included in the International Phonetic Alphabet. Bill Wang (1969) found that some sound changes progress through the lexicon one word at a time rather than being sudden wholesale change of all words that have the sound. The 'lexical' diffusion of sound change is now recognized as one of the primary patterns of language sound change. John Ohala (1981) identified 'innocent misapprehension' as an important mechanism of sound change and documented several cases in which the listener was the source of sound change.

These three - Chao, Wang, and Ohala - established the tradition that the Phonology Lab continues today. Chao taught at Berkeley from 1947 to 1963. He helped establish the Department of Linguistics, and blending his mathematics/physics training with his interest in Chinese dialectology and phonology, gave the study of phonology at Berkeley a decidedly phonetic bent. Wang taught at Berkeley from 1964 to 1994 and established the Phonology Lab in 1967. He was a student of Gordon Peterson at the University of Michigan in a remarkable group that included Ilse Lehiste, Dennis Klatt, June Shoup, Charles Fillmore, and Norris McKinney. Ohala joined the Berkeley Department of Linguistics in 1970 after receiving his Ph.D. from UCLA and spending a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Logopedics and Phoniatrics, University of Tokyo. He became the director of the Phonology Lab in 1975 and retired in 2004.

The lab is funded by the UCB Department of Linguistics, UCB Division of Social Sciences, National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Holbrook Experimental Phonetics Fund.