Amanda L. Miller

Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, University of British Columbia

(Ph.D., The Ohio State University, 2001)

Amanda's C.V.

Press

Classifying Clicks (U.S. National Science Foundation Slideshow)

US News and World Report

PRI's The World Science Podcast of July 24, 2009

Cornell Chronicle of October 21, 2009

Research

My Research Statement

My research generally focuses on the interaction between phonetics and phonology, especially in African Languages. My dissertation research focused on the acoustics and phonotactics of Ju|'hoansi guttural consonants and vowels. Another focus of my research is the articulatory properties of two classes of click consonants, those that involve tongue root retraction and those that do not. Ultrasound studies on these clicks in N|uu have shown that tongue body shape and tongue root shape are important to this contrast. I have also studied a class of clicks that were previously thought to illustrate a contrast in the posterior constriction. My studies have shown that they do not contrast in posterior place of articulation. I have analyzed these segments as airstream contours, a new type of segment. My research on the endangered Southern African language N|uu, undertaken in collaboration with Bonny Sands and Johanna Brugman under the auspices of my NSF grant, has described the entire inventory of 103 N|uu sounds.

I have developed the CHAUSA (Corrected High-speed Anchored Ultrasound with Software Alignment) method, which allows quantitative comparison of dynamic sounds like complex consonants. I am currently working on quantitative analysis of Mangetti Dune !Xung clicks, using Smoothing Spline Analysis of Variance. Current research has shown that the rarefaction gestures in different click types differ. Those that do not co-occur with front vowels involve tongue root retraction, while those that do involve a greater degree of tongue center lowering, and no tongue root retraction.

Teaching

My Teaching Statement

I have taught both undergraduate and graduate level courses in phonetics, field methods, and graduate level seminars at Cornell University and the University of British Columbia. I have taught seminars on The Acoustics of Voice Quality, Feature theory and the mapping between phonetic attributes and phonological features (co-taught with Bruce Moren), and Speech sounds: their phonetic variability and phonological organization (co-taught with Draga Zec) at Cornell University, as well as a seminar on The Phonetics of African languages at the University of British Columbia.

I have taught Field Methods on Khoekhoe(co-taught with Chris Collins), and Kabyle Berber (co-taught with Franca Ferrari).

Selected Publications

Miller, A. (2009). Tongue Body and Tongue Root Shape Differences in N|uu clicks Correlate with Phonotactic Patterns To Appear In Suzanne Fuchs, Christine Shadle, Martine Toda and Marzena Zygis, Eds. The phonology and phonetics of turbulent sounds in speech, Interfaces in Linguistics Series, Berlin: Mouton.

Miller, A., Scott, A., Sands, B. and Shah, S. (2009). Rarefaction Gestures and Coarticulation in Mangetti Dune !Xung clicks, To Appear In. Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communications Association (Interspeech 2009). Causal Productions: Brighton, U.K, Pp. 2279-2282.

Miller, A. and Shah, S. (2009) The Acoustics of Mangetti Dune !Xung ClicksProceedings of the 10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association (Interspeech 2009). Causal Productions: Brighton, U.K., Pp. 2283-2286.

Hudu, F. Miller, A. and Pulleyblank, D. (2009). Ultrasound imaging and theories of tongue root phenomena in African languages Proceedings of the Conference on Language Documentation and Linguistic Theory 2. P. Austin, O. Bond, M. Charette, D. Nathan and P. Sells, Eds. SOAS: London, Pp. 153-163.

Miller, A. and Finch, K. (2009).Corrected High-speed Anchored Ultrasound with Software Alignment. Accepted, Under Revision Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research, May 2009.

Miller, A. (To Appear). A prosodic account of Ju|'hoansi consonant distributional asymmetries In Proceedings of the 2nd International Symposium on Khoisan linguistics (Brenzinger, M. and Konig, C., Eds.), Koeln: Ruediger Koeppe Verlag, 40-73.

Miller, A. (2008). Click Cavity Formation and Dissolution in IsiXhosa: Viewing Clicks with High-Speed Ultrasound. In Sock, R., Fuchs, S. & Y. Laprie, Eds., Proceedings of the 8^th International Seminar on Speech Production, December 2008, pp. 137-140.

Miller, A., Brugman, J., Sands, B., Namaseb, L., Exter, M., and Collins, C. (2007).Differences in Airstream and Posterior Place of Articulation among N|uu Lingual Stops. Journal of the International Phonetic Association 39.2., 129-161.

Miller, A.,Brugman, J., Sands, B., Namaseb, L., Exter, M. and Collins, C. (2007).The Sounds of N|uu: Place and Airstream Contrasts Lee, H.S. and Pittyaporn, P., Eds., Working papers of the Cornell Phonetics Laboratory 19.

Miller, A. L. (2007). Guttural vowels and guttural co-articulation in Ju|'hoansi. Journal of Phonetics 35, 56-84.

Miller, A. and Zec. D. (2003). Acoustics of contrastive palatal affricates predicts phonological patterning Proceedings of the 16^th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (Trouvain, J. and Barry, W., Eds.), Pirrot GmbH, Dudweiler, Germany, 769-772.

Miller, A., Namaseb, L., and Iskarous, K. (In press).Tongue Body constriction differences in click typesIn J. Cole and J. Haulde, Eds., Laboratory Phonology 9, Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 643-656.

Miller-Ockhuizen, A.(1998). "Towards a Unified Decompositional Analysis of Khoisan Lexical Tone". In Schladt, Mathias, Ed. Language, Identity and Conceptualization among the Khoisan. Cologne: Rudiger Koppe Verlag, pp. 217-244.