Blog

Corpus-based measures taken on 21 DoReCo data sets shed new light on an old puzzle: How are phonological and morphological complexity related? It turns out there is a positive typological correlation, specifically between syllable complexity and morphological synthesis, even if looking separately at nouns vs. verbs, and word-initial vs. word-final complexity. Why? Read all about it in Easterday, Stave, Allassonnière-Tang & Seifart’s newest Frontiers paper at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.638659

We finalized processing of 17 languages and analyzed these regarding final lengthening. Results were presented at three conferences: the 12th International Seminar on Speech Production (poster), the 18th Old World Conference on Phonology (abstract), and the 43rd Annual Conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS) (workshop program). Thanks to the audiences for feedback! Here’s a snapshot of some of the results:

Next week DoReCo PI Frank Seifart delivers a lecture in Melbourne (well, virtually) on studying speech rate cross-linguistically. Join in and find out how we build the DoReCo database and how we exploit it: http://www.dynamicsoflanguage.edu.au/news-and-media/events/article/?id=um-coedl-zoom-seminar-studying-speech-rate-cross-linguistically-frank-seifart-14-aug

It’s official: (Former) DoReCo project member Shelece Easterday will be
assistant professor at the University of Hawai’i. Congratulations,
Shelece! We’re looking forward to cooperating with you at U Hawai’i on
corpus-based, cross-linguistic studies on, e.g., phonological complexity.

More research leading up to DoReCo in press now: Are utterance-final words pronounced more slowly than utterance-medial ones across diverse languages? Yes, results from 10 language documentation corpora indicate, and sometimes even penultimate words. Read all about it at http://doreco.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/SeifartEtAl_FinalLengthening.pdf

What makes speakers of diverse languages pronounce a word more quickly vs. more slowly? Research leading up to DoReCo investigated the effects of word frequency, complexity, position, and part of speech on word durations, comparing ten language documentation corpora. Read the full story at http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24926

Early into the second project year, we have now received data sets from more than 50 languages (see http://doreco.info/languages/). These data sets are currently at various stages of processing, but we have already fully processed and created alignments at the word and segment levels for the following five languages: Arapaho, Kamas, Svan, Urum, and Yongning Na. As the number of fully processed corpora grows, several exciting phonetic and morphological studies are already on their way, building on the research ideas described in http://doreco.info/project/. Stay tuned for more info!

We are proud to announce our latest publication, in which we describe in detail DoReCo’s data processing workflow:
Paschen, Ludger, François Delafontaine, Christoph Draxler, Susanne Fuchs, Matthew Stave & Frank Seifart (2020). Building a Time-Aligned Cross-Linguistic Reference Corpus from LanguageDocumentation Data (DoReCo). Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), 2657–2666. http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2020/pdf/2020.lrec-1.324.pdf
For a list of all DoReCo publications, see http://doreco.info/publications/

DoReCo’s sister project QUEST in Berlin is looking for a PostDoc to work on optimizing fieldwork data for cross-linguistic research. We’re open to candidates proposing their own cross-linguistic, cross-corpus research questions for exploratory projects, using, e.g. DoReCo data. Check out details at https://cutt.ly/8yGespq

Our host institution in Berlin, Leibniz-ZAS, currently invites applications for PhD positions, deadline 15.3.2020: https://tinyurl.com/rou29a8. One possibility are PhD projects that exploit and further develop DoReCo. Potential applicants are welcome to contact Frank Seifart before applying. Spread the word among your students and colleagues!