Emily ByersUniversity of New Mexico | UNM · Department of Spanish & Portuguese
Emily Byers
University of New Mexico
About
8
Publications
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Citations since 2017
Introduction
Emily Byers is a Strategic Support Manager at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center ECHO Institute and pursuing her Ph.D. in Hispanic Linguistics at UNM. She investigates the phonetic features of code-switching, phonetic convergence, and understudied dialectal features of cultures in contact across the United States.
Additional affiliations
January 2017 - present
June 2015 - August 2015
August 2011 - August 2013
Publications
Publications (8)
Prominent views in second language acquisition suggest that the age of L2 learning is inversely correlated with native-like pronunciation (Scovel, 1988; Birdsong, 1999). The relationship has been defined in terms of the Critical Period Hypothesis, whereby various aspects of neural cognition simultaneously occur near the onset of puberty, thus inhib...
Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels,...
Vowel reduction is a prominent feature of American English, as well as other stress-timed languages. As a phonological process, vowel reduction neutralizes multiple vowel quality contrasts in unstressed syllables. For bilinguals whose native language is not characterized by large spectral and durational differences between tonic and atonic vowels,...
This study investigates the production of three morphophonetic variations of schwa in American English: the plural allomorph {-s} as in watches, the possessive allomorph {-s} as in Sasha’s, and word-finally as in Russia. The production of these three allomorphs were examined in Miami’s English monolingual and early Spanish-English bilingual populat...
Speech perception involves a complex feedforward/feedback process of decoding bottom-up auditory input while utilizing top-down cognitive/linguistic knowledge to map stored word forms onto incoming acoustic waves (Kinchla & Wolfe, 1979; Sloos & McKeown, 2015). Speech perception in the brain is believed to occur as a result of cortical spreading fro...
Aims/Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether bilinguals categorically displayed shorter or longer schwa durations between fixed word pairs where one word contains a deletable syllable and the other does not (as in “rational” [ræʃənəl] [ræʃnəl] compared with “rationality” [ræʃənæləti]). We hypothesized that monolingual and early...
Speech communication between two native speakers in quiet conditions tends to be effortless and error-free. However, environmental (e.g., noise), talker (e.g., a foreign-accented speaker), or listener (e.g., second language listener) related factors can cause decrements in speech understanding. Under suboptimal listening conditions, substantial ind...
Projects
Projects (3)
We're currently collecting studies that have examined cross-linguistic phonetic influence on code-switched speech for a meta-analysis and review paper (1985-2015). We are collecting studies that examine phonological/phonetic effects at the segmental or suprasegmental level. Studies examining language pairs other than Spanish-English or that examine other phonetic influences besides voice onset timing would be greatly appreciated. If you have a recommendation for a study to include please message me the reference.
global intelligibility of code-switching in Miami's Spanish-English bilingual community
