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Christian DiCanio

@cdicanio.bsky.social
1.2K followers 672 following 1.5K posts

Phonetician and linguist studying prosody and indigenous languages of Mexico / Fonetista y lingüista que estudia idiomas indígenas de México. University at Buffalo. He - él - il - sij³. 🏳️‍🌈 Also ttrpg (rifts, d&d) www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~cdicanio

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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Is it just me or does the @icphs2027.bsky.social Word template just move entire sections to eagerly to the next page, thus making your document too long? I tried the LaTeX template too, but I find I fiddle with LaTeX too much when I use it and it delays actual writing. #phonetics
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Taking a linguistics course improved foreign language grades by about one entire grade (B > A). New publication by UB PhD Kiyono Fujinaga-Gordon, along with Mandy Simons and Seth Weiner. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Take an Introductory Linguistics Course; It May Increase Your Language Learning Ability
Can general linguistics knowledge be used to better learn a new language? This exploratory study is concerned with the potential advantageous transfer of general linguistics knowledge to the learning...
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I'm kind of proud of myself for doing all my data post-processing using just Base R functions (well, ggplot2 aside). I miss the days of just using gplots and messing with 101 par() functions. I still don't know why font size was cex().
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Yes, this is a legitimate concern. This was just one speaker and a few tokens. I've now run on all the vowels for a different speaker. Here's [i, ĩ, iʔ, ĩʔ, iɦ, ĩɦ] (Triqui contrasts). For the ICPhS paper we'll probably just get to look at 4 speakers, but we have data from 12.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I feel more confident about it than just extracting formant bandwidths and calling it a day. Looking at lots of averaged spectra might lead us to more revealing observations than just applying random pre-fab toolkits. Thoughts? n/n
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Since we're looking at nasalization in the context of contrastive non-modal phonation, this approach might address a real empirical question: just what does this look like spectrally? 4/n
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Maybe if we just look at LTAS averaged across speakers/conditions, we can think of this more holistically. These are some LTAS, across a few tokens of [i] and [u] from one speaker. No formant tracking, but the averaging kind of nicely displays F1-F7 here (w/LOESS, but you could set it to GAMS). 3/n
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
We can do all sorts of things to the acoustic signal and have debates about A1-P0, A1-P1, big composite measures involving PCA and machine learning that take tons of computing time to run and don't tell you anything about what's under the hood. 2/n
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I've been toying around with acoustic measures for nasalization recently and I'm kind of curious if it just makes sense to let the spectra speak for themselves. #linguistics #phonetics
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I feel like perhaps I am weird in literally not using any AI tool for anything I do. I have no AI in classes I teach either. I decided a few years ago that I am not going to adjust how I teach or do research to accommodate tools promoting intellectual laziness. Every bit of my content is old school.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The seasoning is petroleum!
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
The title of this conference always makes me think that there must be a requisite number of babushkas in attendance.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
There's a thesis by Goldstein that includes values based off of actual measurements. I changed the Wikipedia entry for this several years ago to reflect this. I think people like "17 cm" though because the function of resonance calculation provides even integer values when you pick "17 cm."
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Good to hear! I have only been using libreoffice actually.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Just like the other social sciences, there is no baseline "social system", "brain/behavior", or "political/economic system." All generalizations in linguistics/phonetics are a product of descriptions of systems varying with human diversity.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It's recordings from one middle-aged white dude living in Boston. I mention this because there persists this notion that some people do "science" and some people do "description." The reality is that we all do at least some description. Even your favorite references are descriptions.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
All phoneticians work on acoustic models based on phonetic descriptions. These descriptions form the basis for theories. Stevens' (2000) seminal tome on acoustic phonetics was based on recordings of his own voice. It's often understood as "generic", but there is no such thing. 1/2 #linguistics
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Probably not. Though that's true for most IPA characters.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
This is a word processor failure. Microsoft products also regularly mix up æ and œ. It's all the more reason to reject all their products and just use OpenOffice or LibreOffice or LaTeX.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It was a pandemic fever dream. Also, I am a nerd.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It is so unbelievably exhausting.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Buffalo linguist: A problem like morphophonology share.google/Pv2Yg03MC4Mu...
share.google
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
ICPhS extended the deadline to 10/9! What a relief! We have a little time to make sure we all can get things submitted in time. I'm elated since I had such a busy September and we're still processing data for our paper. icphs2027.ca/call-for-pap...
icphs2027.ca
Call for Papers – ICPHS 2027
The organizing committee is pleased to announce the call for papers for the 21st International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, which will take place on August 9–13, 2027, in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, has launched.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
I assumed half of it was promoted by bots working for the sad tourism industry in many places of the US.
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Prof. Nicole Holliday @mixedlinguist.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"Disturbingly, many men point to women outnumbering men in college enrollment as evidence that feminism is ruining the world and unfairly penalizing men...But men are not structurally or legally prohibited from attending college as women were decades ago. Men are choosing not to go to college".
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Bwahaha. They will never digitize issues of Maître Phonétique !
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I just mentioned this paper to a student at USC today!
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Dan Isbell @danielrisbell.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Very good news. The proposed rule has had universities, from the top all the way down to individual departments, scrambling to figure out how to continue supporting international students. Good to be relieved of all that... for now.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
This was a big topic at the International Congress of Mathematics this year. I heard all about it because I joined my husband in Philadelphia while he attended. Terry Tao gave a very interesting talk about it.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
One of the major reasons I stopped reading the NYT.
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Dan Isbell @danielrisbell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
New Pew survey on attitudes toward additional language study in the US: www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/...
pewresearch.org
What do Americans think about language learning in U.S. schools?
Four-in-ten Americans say it is extremely or very important for children growing up in the U.S. to learn a language other than English.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Successfully ran my first @roll20.net Rifts game today with people on the east coast and, randomly, Western Australia. We played for about 4 hours and had fun. It’s another homebrew of mine about getting access to a big secret auction run by a rival gang. Your gang boss wants access and information.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
This kind of triggers a childhood memory. I think that the fact that they are colorful and soft-ish triggers “tasty fruit!” Playdo is similarly tempting if you like frosting.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
In linguistics, it’s the occasional “all languages come from X” folks. In addition to being a new ToE, these folks also seem to assume that we all do deep historical reconstruction.
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Rosemary Mosco @rosemarymosco.com · 06/09/2026
I’m going to need everyone who’s reporting on AI psychosis and how it’s making people, especially men, come up with theories of everything to please talk with the scientists who have been getting multiple emails from “theory of everything” guys for decades
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Yep. In many families (Na-Dene, western Otomanguean, Daghestanian), the contrast is aspirated-plain-ejective/glottalized. Lots of languages also have no contrast (aside from place) in stops. The acoustic-perceptual space around stop production has always been bigger than just VOT.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
I also kind of hate that it’s promoted as “magic” by various influencers. I want them all to say “let’s study linguistics!” instead.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
I’ve had a general concern over the past several years that the availability of acoustic analysis suites is having a negative effect on understanding of the acoustics (or of the parameters that are important). Formants are not always accurate. Neither are many other things.
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Indranil Dutta @academicmargin.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Mermelstein (1967); Schroeder (1967) provided ways of estimating the vocal tract transfer transfer function from tube models by looking into the anti-symmetric Fourier coefficients of the formants for open-close tubes. 50 years hence, our most important contribution is everyone measuring #VOT 🤦
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
I think that there are a lot of important acoustic-phonetic and articulatory-phonetic contributions, but the difficulty is that there are fewer people doing a kind of pure phonetics nowadays. People at Haskins have contributed a lot here, as did earlier phoneticians. But nowadays?
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Counterpoint - we turn to studies measuring VOffT instead: voice offset time during obstruent production. It’s usually more interesting for processes of lenition.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I think many fields would be willing to cooperate in theory, but I think the massive obstacle will be syntax. I can not imagine many people working in mainstream generative syntax even entertaining alternative approaches from different theories.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I think I got three reminders last week, all mandatory before the end of October.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
But also, many fonts (and famously, Microsoft) don’t distinguish æ from œ.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Yes, it is a failure. I think it’s kind of a failure of many fonts though and the fact that copyeditors squirm if you want to use a different font in your text. It doesn’t help that many linguists do not distinguish these two vowels in their transcriptions.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
I think one of the old highrise buildings downtown has one for like $1200/month. I mean, trimming the bushes, sweeping, and clearing some snow obviously should cost everyone in the building this much. Oh, I think they have an elliptical too.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Why do linguists love theoreticians so much more than other types of linguists? Like, I think more linguists should love typology and fieldwork, but it seems like it’s not on the radar of many. Cordially, a bad theoretician.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Phoneticians talk too much about formant normalization and too little about accuracy in estimation (but see Shadle et al 2016, Zhang 2022). Your normalization is useless if your data is wrong. #linguistics #phonetics
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
I've entirely given up on trying to know what young people like or connect with. I just ask my students for music recommendations. Or I listen to things I heard on Netflix shows and Instagrams I follow.
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Christian DiCanio @cdicanio.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Why are you asking if Americans wanted any of this? None of us want any of the sh1t the executive branch is doing. They're operating only on their own self-interest, as if citizens were a nuisance.
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