32.3243, Rising Stars: Meet Sean Foley!

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-32-3243. Fri Oct 15 2021. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 32.3243, Rising Stars: Meet Sean Foley!

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Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2021 06:48:12
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: Rising Stars: Meet Sean Foley!

 
Dear Linguist List Readers,

For this week's rising star we have Sean Foley who is a 2nd year MA student
making waves in the linguistics department at UNC Chapel Hill. According to
his professors, when he entered the program he already had the level of
fieldwork experience and participation in professional activities expected of
a PhD student. Sean recently presented a paper on "The acoustics of apical
vowels in two endangered Ngwi languages" at the annual meeting of the Chicago
Linguistic Society and another on "naruo: an endangered Ngwi language spoken
in Yunnan, China" at the International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages
and Linguistics. This is all on top of the fact that he's shown the ability to
learn and apply new theoretical concepts very quickly. As usual, Sean's list
of accomplishments is too long for this preamble so here is his piece...

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There are a number of areas within linguistics that I am particularly excited
about. First, as once stated by linguist Mark Liberman, we are in the midst of
the “golden age of speech and language science”. Advances in tools such as
forced aligners, automatic phonetic measurement, and computational modelling
currently allow speech scientists the ability to more easily parse through
large speech corpora and derive acoustic measurements. These emerging
technologies have led to the birth of what is being termed “corpus phonetics”,
which, as a young subfield of linguistics, has the potential to lead to major
advancements in the phonetics-phonology interface and phonetic/phonological
theory in general.

Second, and along the same lines, corpus phonetics and advances in machine
learning and natural language processing are beginning to form a bridge to one
of the great challenges facing the field of linguistics – language
endangerment. Documentation of the world’s linguistic diversity is undoubtedly
urgent, considering that a majority of the world’s languages are endangered
and may no longer be spoken in the next 50 years. Applying these computational
 methods to language documentation has the tremendous potential to not only
expedite the documentation process but to also bring more endangered languages
into the digital realm. Furthermore, one linguist recently describe to me how
he was using deep learning and automatic speech recognition (ASR) to aid in
language documentation. What’s fascinating is that, as I understand it, this
technology cannot only support these languages, but these languages can in
turn aid in the development of ASR technology that has mainly been trained on
majority languages.

Third, in connection to language documentation, an exciting development is how
the laboratory phonology movement is starting to branch out into the field.
More and more linguists have begun taking portable ultrasound machines into
the field to get articulatory data on under documented languages, while others
have begun to adapt speech perception experiments for the field. Couple these
innovations with the areas above and what the future holds is widely 
accessible speech corpora from a diverse array of languages, which include
potentially not only acoustic data, but also articulatory data. As an aspiring
phonetician, the three areas discussed  above are absolutely thrilling
developments.

Personally, my plan is to continue my studies and enter a PhD program in
linguistics. During this time, my goal is to combine laboratory phonology and
fieldwork, with the premise that the description of endangered languages and
phonological/phonetic theory inform one another. My hope is that such work can
not only combat language endangerment, but can lead to progress in
phonetic/phonological theory, while also leading to advancements in speech
science technology.

******************************************************************

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