Yao Yao    姚瑶

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

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.

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
  

• 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)