Work in progress:
Osage Language Project
Dr. Marcia Haag, Cameron Pratt, Stephanie Rapp, and I are working on a pedagogical grammar for the Osage language. As a language without L1 speakers, this is both an exciting and challenging project. One of our goals it to put together a preliminary acoustic description of the sound system. We hope to be able to glean some basic prosodic information from archived recordings.
Documentation, digitization, and storage of Comanche Audio Recordings.
In 2009, I digitized thirty cassette tapes of Comanche language recordings. I am exploring possibilities of making them available to the public trough the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History Native American Collections, but there are a few formal and legal issues left to work through.
A comparison of schwas: American English and Comanche.
Acoustic work that I have carried out shows that Comanche has a central mid vowel which shares many characteristics with schwa (namely, it is a central, unrounded, mid vowel). English is another language which has schwa; however, Comanche’s schwa sounds very distinct from the English version. I’d like to examine variation in high central vowels across several languages, starting with American English and Comanche.
