Personal research page for Jonathan Evans.

 

My publication page at Academia Sinica is here.

 

email: jonathan AT sinica DOT edu DOT tw

 

Project I: Linear Mixed Effects Modeling of Phonetic Properties.

If you would like me to include links to your data, code, or paper on this topic, please contact me.  Below is a description of the first paper in this project:

 

Toward a comprehensive 'phonology' of f0 at the lexical level.

 

Jonathan Evans, Man-ni Chu, John A. D. Aston

 

Abstract.

The present study introduces the use of Linear Mixed Effects (LME) analysis to model f0 production in a language with two phonemic tones, and demonstrates the advantages of using such a method of analysis.  LME can be used to weigh the impact of a large number of effects, it can demonstrate the interaction among those effects, and can also show how both fixed and random effects contribute to the model.  Unlike previous analytical methods for modeling f0 in tone languages, LME analysis allows researchers to have more freedom in designing experiments, and to have sufficient variety in the dataset without having to rely on nonsense words and phrases to fill out a data matrix. LME makes it is possible to put a multitude of effects and interactions into a single comprehensive model of f0.  The ensuing model is easy to interpret and straightforward to compare crosslinguistically.  LME analysis makes possible a quantitative typology that shows clearly how linguistic and nonlinguistic factors combine in the production of f0 for each language thus analyzed.

 

Keywords. Tone language, Qiang, prosody, linear mixed effects models, random effects, fixed effects, top-down method of modeling.

 

The manuscript is available here.

 

Data can be seen here. Note: The file is tab-delimited text.  Schwa /ə/ is represented as /E/.

 

R code to run the analysis may be downloaded here.  Note: the code has to be changed each time in order to test the variable that is being removed from the model at a given step in the analysis.

 

Project II: Functional Principal Component Linear Mixed Effects Modeling of Phonetic Properties.

 

In this project, John Aston, Jeng-Min Chiou, and I are working on modeling F0 curves at the syllable level.  Email me if you would like to know more about this, or to see our manuscript when it is further along.

 

 

Personal links to pictures of our kids here.