Charles B. Chang

Last updated
Charles B. Chang
Alma mater Harvard University
University of Cambridge
University of California, Berkeley
Known forPhonetic drift (linguistics)
Advantageous language transfer
Scientific career
Fields Linguistics
Phonetics
Phonology
Language acquisition
Second-language acquisition
Language attrition
Institutions University of Maryland, College Park
Rice University
SOAS University of London
Boston University

Charles B. Chang is an associate professor in the linguistics department at Boston University, [1] where he is also affiliated with the Center for the Study of Asia, [2] the Center for Innovation in Social Science, [3] and the Hearing Research Center. [4] Chang is an Associate Editor of the journal Second Language Research [5] and a Life Member of the Linguistic Society of America. [6]

Contents

Biography

Selected as a U.S. Presidential Scholar from New York in 1999, [7] Chang completed his undergraduate education at Harvard University, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 2003. [8] He received an MPhil in English and applied linguistics from the University of Cambridge in 2006 and a PhD in linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2010, writing a dissertation entitled "First language phonetic drift during second language acquisition." [9]

Chang is the recipient of several grants, fellowships, and awards including a Fulbright Program Fellowship, a Gates Cambridge Scholarship, [10] and grants from the National Science Foundation [11] [12] [13] [14] and the National Institutes of Health. [15] [16] In 2016, he was awarded the Peter Paul Career Development Professorship at Boston University. [17] In 2019, he was invited to the Distinguished Professors' Lectures Series at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań (Poland). [18] In 2022, he was honored with the Early Career Award by the Linguistic Society of America "for contributions to the understanding of bilingual sound systems and cross-linguistic interactions, phonetic drift, and language learning over the lifespan, and to fostering diversity and inclusion within linguistics" [19] and was named a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society. [20] In 2023, he was awarded the inaugural Anne Cutler International Visiting Fellowship by Western Sydney University as well as a Humboldt Research Fellowship for Experienced Researchers by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. [21]

Prior to his appointment at Boston University, Chang taught at the University of Maryland, College Park, Rice University, and SOAS University of London. His research is in the areas of phonetics, phonology, language acquisition, and language attrition, with a focus on second-language acquisition and multilingualism in adulthood and heritage language speakers and learners. [22] [23] He is known for discovering changes to the native language sound system occurring at the beginning of second-language acquisition and, more generally, native language phonetic modifications due to recent second-language experience, which he termed phonetic drift. [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] He is also known for documenting a "native-language transfer benefit" in second-language speech perception whereby non-native (bilingual) listeners outperform native listeners due to the influence of advantageous experience from their other language. [29] [30]

Published works (selected)

Related Research Articles

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and execute movements to produce speech, how various movements affect the properties of the resulting sound or how humans convert sound waves to linguistic information. Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones and it is also defined as the smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language.

In sociolinguistics, an accent is a way of pronouncing a language that is distinctive to a country, area, social class, or individual. An accent may be identified with the locality in which its speakers reside, the socioeconomic status of its speakers, their ethnicity, their caste or social class, or influence from their first language.

A heritage language is a minority language learned by its speakers at home as children, and difficult to be fully developed because of insufficient input from the social environment. The speakers grow up with a different dominant language in which they become more competent. Polinsky and Kagan label it as a continuum that ranges from fluent speakers to barely speaking individuals of the home language. In some countries or cultures which determine a person's mother tongue by the ethnic group they belong to, a heritage language would be linked to the native language.

Language transfer is the application of linguistic features from one language to another by a bilingual or multilingual speaker. Language transfer may occur across both languages in the acquisition of a simultaneous bilingual, from a mature speaker's first language (L1) to a second language (L2) they are acquiring, or from an L2 back to the L1. Language transfer is most commonly discussed in the context of English language learning and teaching, but it can occur in any situation when someone does not have a native-level command of a language, as when translating into a second language. Language transfer is also a common topic in bilingual child language acquisition as it occurs frequently in bilingual children especially when one language is dominant.

Second-language acquisition (SLA), sometimes called second-language learning—otherwise referred to as L2acquisition, is the process by which people learn a second language. Second-language acquisition is also the scientific discipline devoted to studying that process. The field of second-language acquisition is regarded by some but not everybody as a sub-discipline of applied linguistics but also receives research attention from a variety of other disciplines, such as psychology and education.

Auditory phonetics is the branch of phonetics concerned with the hearing of speech sounds and with speech perception. It thus entails the study of the relationships between speech stimuli and a listener's responses to such stimuli as mediated by mechanisms of the peripheral and central auditory systems, including certain areas of the brain. It is said to compose one of the three main branches of phonetics along with acoustic and articulatory phonetics, though with overlapping methods and questions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Ladefoged</span> British phonetician (1925–2006)

Peter Nielsen Ladefoged was a British linguist and phonetician. He was Professor of Phonetics at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he taught from 1962 to 1991. His book A Course in Phonetics is a common introductory text in phonetics, and The Sounds of the World's Languages is widely regarded as a standard phonetics reference. Ladefoged also wrote several books on the phonetics of African languages. Prior to UCLA, he was a lecturer at the universities of Edinburgh, Scotland and Ibadan, Nigeria (1959–60).

Two types of language change can be characterized as linguistic drift: a unidirectional short-term and cyclic long-term drift.

Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language are heard, interpreted, and understood. The study of speech perception is closely linked to the fields of phonology and phonetics in linguistics and cognitive psychology and perception in psychology. Research in speech perception seeks to understand how human listeners recognize speech sounds and use this information to understand spoken language. Speech perception research has applications in building computer systems that can recognize speech, in improving speech recognition for hearing- and language-impaired listeners, and in foreign-language teaching.

A diaphoneme is an abstract phonological unit that identifies a correspondence between related sounds of two or more varieties of a language or language cluster. For example, some English varieties contrast the vowel of late with that of wait or eight. Other English varieties contrast the vowel of late or wait with that of eight. This non-overlapping pair of phonemes from two different varieties can be reconciled by positing three different diaphonemes: A first diaphoneme for words like late, a second diaphoneme for words like wait, and a third diaphoneme for words like eight.

The generative approach to second language (L2) acquisition (SLA) is a cognitive based theory of SLA that applies theoretical insights developed from within generative linguistics to investigate how second languages and dialects are acquired and lost by individuals learning naturalistically or with formal instruction in foreign, second language and lingua franca settings. Central to generative linguistics is the concept of Universal Grammar (UG), a part of an innate, biologically endowed language faculty which refers to knowledge alleged to be common to all human languages. UG includes both invariant principles as well as parameters that allow for variation which place limitations on the form and operations of grammar. Subsequently, research within the Generative Second-Language Acquisition (GenSLA) tradition describes and explains SLA by probing the interplay between Universal Grammar, knowledge of one's native language and input from the target language. Research is conducted in syntax, phonology, morphology, phonetics, semantics, and has some relevant applications to pragmatics.

Clinical linguistics is a sub-discipline of applied linguistics involved in the description, analysis, and treatment of language disabilities, especially the application of linguistic theory to the field of Speech-Language Pathology. The study of the linguistic aspect of communication disorders is of relevance to a broader understanding of language and linguistic theory.

Catherine Phebe Browman was an American linguist and speech scientist. She received her Ph.D. in linguistics from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1978. Browman was a research scientist at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey (1967–1972). While at Bell Laboratories, she was known for her work on speech synthesis using demisyllables. She later worked as researcher at Haskins Laboratories in New Haven, Connecticut (1982–1998). She was best known for developing, with Louis Goldstein, of the theory of articulatory phonology, a gesture-based approach to phonological and phonetic structure. The theoretical approach is incorporated in a computational model that generates speech from a gesturally-specified lexicon. Browman was made an honorary member of the Association for Laboratory Phonology.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Perception of English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese speakers</span> Japanese-language speakers perception of English consonants

Japanese has one liquid phoneme, realized usually as an apico-alveolar tap and sometimes as an alveolar lateral approximant. English has two: rhotic and lateral, with varying phonetic realizations centered on the postalveolar approximant and on the alveolar lateral approximant, respectively. Japanese speakers who learn English as a second language later than childhood often have difficulty in hearing and producing the and of English accurately.

Heather Goad is a Canadian linguist. Her research explores areas of phonology and language acquisition, especially investigating the shapes of phonological systems, including contrasts in English, French, Korean, Portuguese, Italian and Nepali, as well as the developmental paths of acquiring speech sounds by first and second language learners.

Patrice (Pam) Speeter Beddor is John C. Catford Collegiate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Michigan, focusing on phonology and phonetics. Her research has dealt with phonetics, including work in coarticulation, speech perception, and the relationship between perception and production.

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Elizabeth Cook Zsiga is a linguist whose work focuses on phonology and phonetics. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University.

Georgia Zellou is an American linguistics professor at the University of California-Davis. Her research focuses on topics in phonetics and laboratory phonology.

References

  1. ↑ "Charles Chang". Department of Linguistics, Boston University. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  2. ↑ "Affiliated Faculty". Center for the Study of Asia, Boston University. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  3. ↑ "People". Center for Innovation in Social Science, Boston University. Retrieved 26 November 2021.
  4. ↑ "Faculty & Visiting Faculty". Hearing Research Center, Boston University. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  5. ↑ "Editorial Board". Second Language Research: SAGE Journals. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  6. ↑ "Paid Life Membership in the LSA". Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  7. ↑ "Charles Chang - Presidential Scholars Directory". Presidential Scholars Directory. Retrieved 26 August 2022.
  8. ↑ "List of graduating seniors elected to Phi Beta Kappa". Harvard Gazette. 5 June 2003. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  9. ↑ "First Language Phonetic Drift During Second Language Acquisition". Dissertations, Department of Linguistics. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  10. ↑ "Gates Cambridge Scholarship Year Book, 2006-07" (PDF). Gates Cambridge Trust. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  11. ↑ "Doctoral Dissertation Research: Restructuring Phonetic Space in Second Language Acquisition". NSF Award Search: Award #0922652. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  12. ↑ "Boston University Conference on Language Development 2017-2021". NSF Award Search: Award #1728962. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  13. ↑ "Boston University Conference on Language Development, Post-COVID". NSF Award Search: Award #2141327. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  14. ↑ "Doctoral Dissertation Research: Investigating Sound Change in an Understudied Language: A Sociophonetic Study of Age and Locality Effects". NSF Award Search: Award #2214689. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  15. ↑ "Boston University Conference on Language Development". Project Details - NIH RePORTER. Retrieved 26 November 2021.
  16. ↑ "Boston University Conference on Language Development, 2022-2026". Project Details - NIH RePORTER. Retrieved 29 July 2022.
  17. ↑ "Six Junior Faculty Receive Career Development Awards". BU Today, Boston University. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  18. ↑ "WA Distinguished Professors' Lectures: Integration and dynamicity in bilingual speech perception by Prof. Charles Chang". AMU Faculty of English. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  19. ↑ "LSA Announces Major Awards for 2022". Linguistic Society of America. Retrieved 26 November 2021.
  20. ↑ "Congratulations to Our New Fellows - 2022 Fall Class of Fellows". Psychonomic Society. Retrieved 2 February 2023.
  21. ↑ "Prof. Dr. Charles Chang - Profile - Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation". Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung. Retrieved 17 September 2023.
  22. ↑ Chang, Charles B., Yao Yao, Erin F. Haynes, and Russell Rhodes. (2011). Production of phonetic and phonological contrast by heritage speakers of Mandarin. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 129, 3964–3980.
  23. ↑ Chang, Charles B. and Yao Yao. (2016). Toward an understanding of heritage prosody: Acoustic and perceptual properties of tone produced by heritage, native, and second language speakers of Mandarin. Heritage Language Journal, 13, 134–160.
  24. ↑ "Phonetic Drift". The Loh Down on Science. Retrieved 2 August 2020.
  25. ↑ Chang, Charles B. (2012). Rapid and multifaceted effects of second-language learning on first-language speech production. Journal of Phonetics, 40, 249-268.
  26. ↑ Chang, Charles B. (2013). A novelty effect in phonetic drift of the native language. Journal of Phonetics, 41, 520-533.
  27. ↑ Chang, Charles B. (2019a). Language change and linguistic inquiry in a world of multicompetence: Sustained phonetic drift and its implications for behavioral linguistic research. Journal of Phonetics, 74, 96-113.
  28. ↑ Chang, Charles B. (2019b). Phonetic drift. In Monika S. Schmid and Barbara Köpke (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language attrition, pp. 191-203. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
  29. ↑ Chang, Charles B. and Alan Mishler. (2012). Evidence for language transfer leading to a perceptual advantage for non-native listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 132, 2700–2710.
  30. ↑ Chang, Charles B. (2016). Bilingual perceptual benefits of experience with a heritage language. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 19, 791–809.
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