Rasmus
Puggaard-Rode
Hi! I’m Rasmus Puggaard-Rode, roughly pronunced [ˈʁɑsmus ˌpʰukːɒːˀˈʁoːɤ]. I’m a postdoctoral fellow in the Spoken Language Processing group led by James Kirby at the Institute of Phonetics and Speech Processing, Ludwig Maximilian University, where I’m working on a variety of topics, including microprosodic cues to obstruent voicing contrasts, microprosodic cues to laryngeal coda consonants, the articulatory dynamics of Danish consonants, and the development of software tools for processing and visualizing acoustic data.
Most of my work (including my dissertation) has dealt with the stop consonants of Danish. Colleagues and I have investigated intervocalic voicing and spectral characteristics of stop releases, and used a large legacy corpus of dialect recordings to investigate regional variation in voice onset time, closure voicing, and characteristics of stop releases. We have also proposed a new phonological analysis of the infamous Danish stop-semivowel alternations, suggesting that they are better understood as the outcome of sound change rather than synchronically active phonology.
I have also published on information structure from an interactional linguistics perspective, forensic phonetics, second language acquisition, and morphological change.
News
I have just been to Denmark for two back-to-back meetings. I helped organize the biannual Phonetics and Phonology in Denmark, and gave a workshop introducing
praatpicture, my R package for plotting acoustic data with time-aligned annotations. I got some nice feedback and have added some new functions to the latest version of the package. I also went to the biannual Danish linguistics meeting Møde om udforskningen af dansk sprog, where I presented ongoing work on the articulation and acoustics of the Danish semivowel known as the ‘soft d’. This work is done in collaboration with Francesco Burroni and Aleese Block.I was just in Tartu for the International Symposium on Applied Phonetics where I presented co-authored work with Kathleen Jepson about the acoustic properties of Dhuwaya stops, and how they might be used to improve literacy teaching. Thanks for all the stimulating conversations!
A paper of mine has been published in Journal of Phonetics. This paper demonstrates that variability in coda stop lenition in Jutland Danish is predictable from how the laryngeal contrast is precisely realized in onset stops. Here you can find a version of the paper with embedded analysis code, and here you can download the data and code.
I’ve contributed to work that will be presented at two conferences in Australia later this year. Kathleen Jepson, John Mansfield and I had a paper accepted for the conference of the Australian Linguistic Society in Canberra in November about stylized sustained prosody in narrative speech in native Australian languages, and Kathleen Jepson and I had a paper accepted for the 19th Australasian International Conference on Speech Science and Technology in Melbourne in December about what governs vowel duration in Djambarrpuyŋu in phonological contexts where it is not contrastive.
I was at Speech Prosody in Leiden, where I presented a paper on stylized sustained pitch in narrative speech in native Australian languages, coauthored with Kathleen Jepson and John Mansfield; slides are here, and the full paper is available here. I also coauthored a paper on coda pitch perturbations in Eastern Khmu’ with James Kirby, Francesco Burroni, and Sireemas Maspong (full paper here), which was part of a special session on segmental influences on prosody that I co-organized with Menghui Shi. It was a very stimulating conference, and it was great to be back at my alma mater!