Yao Yao    姚瑶



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Ph.D. Candidate
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Linguistics

1203 Dwinelle Hall
Berkeley, CA94709
USA


 


[ General | Research | Publications | Presentations | Teaching ]

General


I am currently a Ph.D. candidate in the linguistics department of the University of California at Berkeley. My main research areas are psycholinguistics, phonetics and corpus linguistics. I am also interested in language acquisition and language documentation. A copy of my full CV is available here.

Research

Variation in spontaneous speech
Speech sounds are inevitably different from each other. Even the same word produced by the same speaker is different from one production to another. A wide range of factors have been shown to affect speech production, including age, gender, dialectal background, socioeconomic status, background noise, as well as speech rate, phonetic context, word frequency, contextual predictability, etc. A major part of my work is devoted to describing the general picture of phonetic variation in spontaneous speech. The database I am using the most is the Buckeye Corpus of conversational American English.

Phonological neighborhood
A lexicon (i.e. the collection of words in a language) can be viewed as a network of words in which similar-sounding words are connected to form phonological neighborhoods. Studies have shown that the processing of a word is sensitive to the phonological neighborhood where the target word resides in. In specific, words from dense neighborhoods (i.e. with many similar-sounding neighbors) take longer to recognize and induce more errors than words from sparse neighborhoods. On the other hand, it has also been argued (with controversy though) that dense neighborhood has a facilitative effect on word production, presumably because words with many neighbors are more easily activated and thus easier to produce. My research work investigates the phonological neighborhood effect on speech production in spontaneous speech. I am also interested in how phonological neighborhoods are developed in children's lexicons.

Phonetic acquisition and bilingualism
Together with my colleagues at UC Berkeley, I am working on a project which compares the production of both English and Chinese in heritage speakers of Mandarin, to that of native Mandarin speakers who acquire English as L2, as well as native English speakers who acquire Mandarin as L2. Heritage speakers, in the broad sense, refer to people who are exposed to a heritage language at home but have shifted to primarily using the dominant language. Most of our heritage speakers are from Chinese immigrant families in California.

Language documentation
My colleagues and I are also engaged in documenting a native American language, Southeastern Pomo (Northern Hokan, Pomoan), which is historically spoken in the area near Clear Lake, CA. Today the language is severely endangered, having only one speaker left. Based on the fieldwork we did with the last speaker, we have developed an orthography for the language and published the elicited data in the form of an online dictionary (click here). More fieldwork is underway, in order to document and analyze the language before it completely dies.

Other ongoing projects

  • Word order variation in Chinese ditransitive constructions
  • Tone production in whispered Mandarin
  • Syntax and semantics of the verb-copying structure in Mandarin Chinese

Publications

Journal papers

Ke, Jinyun, and Yao Yao. (2008) Analyzing language development from a network approach. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, Vol 15, 1, pp 70-99. [pdf]


Book chapters

Yao, Yao. (submitted) Phonological neighbourhood development in children's lexicons. [pdf]


Conference proceedings

Yao, Yao. (2009a). An Exemplar-based Approach to Automatic Burst Detection in Spontaneous Speech. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL XVIII). Seoul, South Korea: Korea University. [pdf]

Yao, Yao. (2009b). Understanding VOT Variation in Spontaneous Speech. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL XVIII). Seoul, South Korea: Korea University. [pdf]

Yao, Yao, Charles B. Chang, Shira Katseff, Russell Lee-Goldman, and Marta Piqueras-Brunet. (2009). A web-accessible dictionary of Southeastern Pomo. In Proceedings of the 18th International Congress of Linguists (CIL XVIII). Seoul, South Korea: Korea University. [pdf]

Chang, Charles B., Erin F. Haynes, Yao Yao, and Russell Rhodes. (2009). The Phonetic Space of Phonological Categories in Heritage Speakers of Mandarin. In Malcolm Elliott et al. (eds.), Proceedings from the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society: The Main Session, 31-45. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. [pdf]

Chang, Charles B., Erin F. Haynes, Yao Yao, and Russell Rhodes. (2009). A Tale of Five Fricatives: Consonantal Contrast in Heritage Speakers of Mandarin. In Laurel MacKenzie (ed.), University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 15.1: 37-43. Philadelphia, PA: Penn Linguistics Club. [pdf]

Chang, Charles, and Yao Yao. (2007) Tone production in whispered Mandarin. In the Proceedings of the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVI), 1085-88. Saarbrucken, Germany, August 2007. [pdf]

Yao, Yao. (2007) Double nominative construction revisited - a corpus-based study on the semantic interpretation of Chinese topic sentences. In the Proceedings of the 8th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW08), 25-31. Hong Kong, May 2007. [pdf]


Presentations/Posters
2009 Separating talker- and listener-oriented forces in speech using phonological neighborhood density. Paper to be presented at the 2010 Annual Meeting of Linguistic Society of America. Baltimore, MD, January 2010.
2009 Effect of phonological neighborhood density on word duration in spontaneous speech. Poster to be presented at the 2009 Fall Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. San Antonio, TX, October 2009.
2009 Is speech talker-oriented or listener-oriented? - Evidence from phonological neighborhood effect in spontaneous speech production. Invited talk at TREND: A Trilateral Weekend of Linguistics. Stanford University, May 2009.
2009 To learn or not to learn: The growing path of children's phonological neighborhoods. Paper presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of Linguistic Society of America. San Francisco, CA, January 2009. [ppt]
2008 With Xie, Zhiguo. Topic-driven derivation and interpretation of verb copying in mandarin Chinese. Poster presented at the Western Conference of Linguistics (WECOL 2008). Davis, CA, Novemeber 2008. [ppt]
A report on vowel alternation in the pronunciation in conversational American English. Paper presented at the 37th of the New Ways of Analyzing Variation conference (NWAV37). Houston, TX, November 2008. [ppt]
Understanding VOT variation in spontaneous speech. Paper presented at the 18th Congress of International Linguists (CIL18). Seoul, Korea, July 2008. [ppt]
An exemplar-based approach to automatic burst detection in voiceless stops. Paper presented at the 18th Congress of International Linguists (CIL18). Seoul, Korea, July 2008. [ppt]
With Chang, Charles, Shira Katseff, Russell Lee-Goldman, Marta Piqueras-Brunet. A web-accessible dictionary of Southeastern Pomo. The 18th Congress of International Linguists (CIL18). Seoul, Korea, July 2008. [ppt]
With Chang, Charles, Erin Haynes, and Russell Rhodes. The phonetic space of phonological categories in heritage speakers of Mandarin. Paper presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago, April 25. [ppt]
With Chang, Charles, Erin Haynes, and Russell Rhodes. A tale of two fricatives: Consonantal contrast in heritage speakers of Mandarin. Paper presented at the 32nd Penn Linguistics Colloquium. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, February 23. [ppt]
With Chang, Charles. Reexamining cue enhancement: The case of whispered tones in Mandarin Chinese. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. Chicago, IL, January 2008. [pdf]
2007 An exemplar-based approach to automatically detect burst in word-initial voiceless stops in spontaneous speech. Poster presented at the 2007 Fall Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. New Orleans, LA, November 2007.
With Chang, Charles. Tone production in whispered Mandarin. Paper presented at the 16th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS XVI). Saarbrucken, Germany, August 2007.
Double nominative construction revisited - a corpus-based study on the semantic interpretation of Chinese topic sentences. Paper presented at the 8th Chinese Lexical Semantics Workshop (CLSW08). Hong Kong, May 2007. [pdf]
2004 With Ke, Jinyun and James W. Minett. Lexicon evolves as a self-organizing small world network. Paper presented at the 12th Annual Conference of the International Association of Chinese Linguistics (IACL12). Tianjin, China, June 2004.

Teaching
  • Ling5 Introduction to linguistics (Spring, 2008)
  • C100AX Advanced Chinese for heritage speakers (Fall, 2007)
  • C10AB Intermediate Chinese (2004-2006)
  • C1AB Elementary Chinese (Summer, 2005)
  • C10AX Intermediate Chinese for heritage speakers (Fall, 2004)