Research

Research interests

My work is focused on speech prosody as it relates to phonological structure and language acquisition. In particular, I use experimental phonetic methods to investigate how patterns of lexical prosody, intonation and rhythm are coded in different languages, and how individuals with different language experience learn these patterns. So far, I have worked with typologically different languages such as English, Russian, Japanese, Mandarin, Balsas Nahuatl, Kihehe, and Houma. The major areas of my research interests include: speech perception and production, second language acquisition and pedagogy, individual differences in language learning.

Publications

• Shport, I.A. (2015). Perception of acoustic cues to Tokyo Japanese pitch-accent contrasts in native Japanese and naive English listeners. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 138 (1), 307-318. doi: 10.1121/1.4922468
• Shport, I. (2014). Variation in prosodic phonology: Individual differences in production ofthe pitch-accent contrast. In C. Gussenhoven, Y. Chen, and D. Dediu (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages (pp. 104-107). Nijmegen, The Netherlands. Accessible at http://www.isca-speech.org/archive/tal_2014/ 
•  Shport, I.A. & Redford, M.A. (2013). Lexical and phrasal prominence patterns in school-aged children's speech. Journal of Child Language. doi:10.1017/S030500091300024X
• Shport, I.A. (2012). Children’s productions of multi-syllabic lexical stress patterns in different prosodic positions. Proceedings of InterSpeech 2012 (paper 1440). Portland, Oregon.
• Shport, I.A. & Redford, M.A. (2011). Interactions between lexical and phrasal prosody cues in school-aged children’s speech. In W.-S. Lee & E. Zee (Eds.), Proceedings of the 17^th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (pp. 1838-41). Hong Kong.
• Guion, S.G., Amith, J.D., Doty, C.S., & Shport, I.A. (2010). Word-level prosody in Balsas Nahuatl: The origin, development, and acoustic correlates of tone in a stress accent language. Journal of Phonetics 38, 137-166.
• Shport, I.A. & Guion, S.G. (2008). The effect of segmental structure on F0 patterns of words in Tokyo Japanese. Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan 12(2), 4-16.
• Shport, I.A. (2008). Acquisition of Japanese pitch accent by American learners. In P. Heinrich and Y. Sugita (eds.), Japanese as foreign language in the age of globalization (pp. 165-187). German Institute for Japanese Studies, München: Iudicium Verlag.
• Shport, I.A. (2008). Culture-specific concepts of ‘sad’: Revising cognitive scenarios through dimensional decomposition. Proceedings of the 3^rd International Conference in Cognitive Science (pp. 146-147). Russia, Moscow.

Selected Conference Presentations

• Shport, I.A., & Guion Anderson, S.G. (2012). English and Russian listeners perceive cues to lexical pitch accent differently. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 121(5), 3200.
• Shport, I.A., & Guion Anderson, S.G. (2011). Cross-linguistic perception and learning of F0 fall as an acoustic cue to Japanese pitch accent. 85th Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America. PA, Pittsburgh.
• Shport, I.A. (2008). Oral proficiency and pauses in speech: What is the connection? Spring Meeting of the Confederation in Oregon for Language Teaching. Oregon, Newberg.
• Shport, I.A. (2007). A prototypical pitch pattern of unaccented Japanese words. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 121(5), 3200. [PPT of invited talk]
• Shport, I.A. (2007). Acquisition of the mora-timing: Evidence from spontaneous speech of American learners of Japanese. Journal of the Phonetic Society of Japan, 11(2), 94. [text of invited talk]
• Shport, I.A. (2006). Development of oral proficiency as captured by the Japanese STAMP test. Joint Fall Conference of the Confederation in Oregon for Language Teaching and the Washington Association for Language Teaching. Oregon, Portland.
• Shport, I.A. (2006). Nasals as tone-bearing units in Kihehe. 37th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Oregon, Eugene.