Phonological research in the Department focuses on phonological patterns, their analysis and the theories aimed at explaining them.
Phonological research at UBC is driven by a wide range of theoretical questions and approached with a variety of different methodologies. Our faculty specialise in, for example, the representation and analysis of tone, harmony, contrast and distinctive features; constraint-based grammars and information-theoretic systems; the acquisition and learnability of phonological grammars; and the phonetic, phonological and morpho-phonological patterns of a wide range of languages. These include both signed and spoken languages from many different regions and language families; for example, recent research features American Sign Language (Canada, U.S.), Icelandic (Iceland), French (Canada, Europe, etc.), Korean (Korea), Cantonese (Hong Kong), Yorùbá (Nigeria), Dàgáárè (Ghana), Fungwa (Nigeria), Nata (Tanzania), Gitksan (B.C.), Kaska/Dene Zā́gé’ (B.C., Yukon), Blackfoot (Alberta), and many others. We draw our data from original elicitation work with native-speaker consultants in the field or in the laboratory, corpus-based methods (sometimes using in-house software), and experiments including laboratory learning of artificial languages, ultrasound studies of articulation, nonce-probe tasks (‘wug tests’), and games that capture children’s production and perception abilities.