Oriana Kilbourn-Ceron

I'm a Conversational Designer at Groupe Technologique Desjardins, part of Mouvement Desjardins. I work on creating a high-performance virtual assistant powered by smart design and powerful statistical language models.

Previously, I was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Linguistics at Northwestern University, working with Matt Goldrick at SoundLab. I completed my PhD at McGill University and have taught undergraduate courses at Concordia University.

My research tackles topics in phonology, phonetics, and speech production. I use the methodologies of acoustic corpus analysis and speech production experiments to investigate how speakers plan what they’re about to say, and how that planning affects the pronunciation of what they end up saying. Do you think you might pronounce words differently if you also had to remember a phone number while talking, or if you had to read a sentence full of words that you know but don’t use very often? These are a few of the questions I’m trying to answer in my research.

To learn more, take a look at my curriculum vitae, list of publications, and course descriptions. You can also send me an email, tweet at me, or request any of my articles though ResearchGate. You can find any available data and scripts through my OSF profile.

news

Oct 15, 2020	I’ll be presenting a poster with co-author Matt Goldrick at the 179th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America Acoustics Virtually Everywhere. Our poster is on December 7th in the Neuro and Psycholinguistics session at 3:35 PM - 4:20 PM EST.
Jul 31, 2020	You can now watch the video from my talk “Larger phonological planning windows trigger variation in word-final consonants” at LabPhon17 with co-author Matt Goldrick. You can also request a copy of the project’s manuscript .
Jun 10, 2020	Fresh off the presses, you can now read Predictability modulates pronunciation variants through speech planning effects: A case study on coronal stop realizations in the Journal of the Association of Laboratory Phonology.

selected publications

LabPhon

Predictability modulates pronunciation variants through production planning effects: a case study on coronal stop realizations

Kilbourn-Ceron, Oriana, Clayards, Meghan, and Wagner, Michael

Laboratory Phonology 2020

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Predictability has been shown to be associated with many dimensions of variation in speech, including durational variation and variable omission of segments. However, the mechanism or mechanisms that underlie these effects are still unclear. This paper presents data on a new aspect of predictability in speech, namely how it affects allophonic variation. We examine two coronal stop allophones in English, flap and glottal stop, and find that their relationship with predictability is quite different from what is expected under current theories of probabilistic reduction in speech. Flapping is more likely when the word that follows is more predictable, but is not influenced by the frequency of the word itself, while glottal stops are more likely in words that are less predictable. We propose that the crucial distinction between these two allophones is how they are conditioned by phonological context. This, we argue, interacts with online speech planning processes and gives rise to variability for context-dependent allophones. This hypothesis offers a specific, testable mechanism for certain predictability effects, and has the potential to extend to other factors that contribute to variability in speech.
NLLT

Boundary phenomena and variability in Japanese high vowel devoicing

Kilbourn-Ceron, Oriana, and Sonderegger, Morgan

Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 2018

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Devoicing of high vowels (HVD) in Tokyo Japanese applies in two environments—between voiceless consonants, and between a voiceless consonant and a “pause”—and applies variably as a function of a number of factors. The role and definition of “pause” in this process, in terms of a physical pause or prosodic position (word or phrase boundary), remains unclear, as does what is expected when these environments overlap, and why HVD appears to be categorical in some environments and variable in others. This paper addresses three outstanding issues about HVD—the role of “boundary phenomena” (prosodic position and physical pauses), the relationship between the two environments, and the sources of variability in HVD—by examining vowel devoicing in a large corpus of spontaneous Japanese. We use mixed-effects logistic regression to model how boundary phenomena affect the likelihood of devoicing and modulate the effects of other variables, controlling for other major factors, including a measure of gestural overlap. The results suggest that all boundary phenomena jointly affect devoicing rate, and that prosodic phrase boundaries play a key role: variability in HVD looks qualitatively different for phrase-internal and phrase-final vowels, which are affected differently by word frequency, speech rate, and pause duration. We argue the results support an account of HVD as the result of two overlapping vowel devoicing processes, each widely-attested cross-linguistically: devoicing between voiceless consonants, and devoicing before prosodic phrase boundaries. Variability in the application of these two processes can then be partially explained in terms of aspects of phonetic implementation and processing: gestural overlap (Beckman 1996), which often plays a role in reduction processes, and the locality of production planning (Wagner 2012), a recent explanation for variability in the application of external sandhi processes.
Lang Cog Neuro

Using automated acoustic analysis to explore the link between planning and articulation in second language speech production

Goldrick, Matthew, Shrem, Yosi, Kilbourn-Ceron, Oriana, Baus, Cristina, and Keshet, Joseph

Language, Cognition and Neuroscience 2020

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Speakers learning a second language show systematic differences from native speakers in the retrieval, planning, and articulation of speech. A key challenge in examining the interrelationship between these differences at various stages of production is the need for manual annotation of fine-grained properties of speech. We introduce a new method for automatically analysing voice onset time (VOT), a key phonetic feature indexing differences in sound systems cross-linguistically. In contrast to previous approaches, our method allows reliable measurement of prevoicing, a dimension of VOT variation used by many languages. Analysis of VOTs, word durations, and reaction times from German-speaking learners of Spanish (Baus et al., 2013) suggest that while there are links between the factors impacting planning and articulation, these two processes also exhibit some degree of independence. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of speech production and future research in bilingual language processing.