Silvina Bongiovanni

Dr. Bongiovanni’s research is in the area of phonetics and phonology. Her research focuses on regional variation, as well as variation in the acquisition process. This endeavor is critically informed by phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics and language acquisition and seeks to identify and explain the sources, loci, and communicative functions of structured variation in speech. The ways in which people produce and perceive variation have been shown to mirror patterns of change or development, in spite of the fact that overall the signal is very noisy. By focusing on one particular linguistic phenomenon, we can approach variation, and language change, in a controlled manner. Recent work explores variation in the production of nasality (i.e. sounds that are produced with air passing through the nose as well as the mouth), both in vowels and in consonants, using elicitation tasks and specialized equipment, basic data analysis and hypothesis testing. REU students will learn to distinguish between linguistic variation from random variation (i.e. noise in the signal), identify relevant variables for language research, perform hands on data processing with software and methods tailored for phonetic work, (e.g. Praat, nasometry, etc.)