Olga Gordeeva's web page

		Olga Gordeeva, PhD Research Fellow Speech Science Research Centre Queen Margaret University College Clerwood Terrace Edinburgh EH12 8TS E-mail
	[Research Interests] [Current Projects] [PhD Research] [Publications] [Short CV] [Research Interests] Acoustic phonetics Child language acquisition Bilingual and second language acquisition Suprasegmental phonetics and phonology Sociolinguistic variation back to top [Current Projects] Electroglottographic analysis of Scottish English vowel contrasts (tense/lax and the Scottish vowel length rule) Bilingual and monolingual child language acquisition Distributional and functional analysis of preaspiration of Scottish English voiceless fricatives Crosslinguistic normalisation of vowel formant measurements for the vocal tract length differences back to top [PhD Research] Language Interaction in the Bilingual Acquisition of Sound Structure: A longitudinal study of vowel quality, duration and vocal effort in pre-school children speaking Scottish English and Russian. [abstract] [full text] See also SSRC theses pages. Aim: to account for the language differentiation and interaction patterns in bilingual acquisition of sound structure. Provide explanations for the occurrence of language interaction from the point of view of crosslinguistic structure, language input conditions and maturational effects. My PhD research concerns an instrumental acoustic analysis of bilingual speech production of vowel quality, vowel duration and vocal effort (spectral balance) at the word-prosodic level. I am interested to account for bilingual language interaction effects (their sources and direction) arising from crosslinguistic differences in the implementation of vowel duration conditioning (intrinsic or extrinsic), and how these differences in vowel duration affect vowel quality and vocal effort. I studied the acquisition patterns of two Russian-Scottish English bilingual children aged between 3;4 and 4;5. Results show that at the level of sound structure, the development of bilingual’s languages does not appear to be fully autonomous. Language differentiation can be partial, or even be missing at certain developmental stages. The extent of differentiation varies depending on the sound structure involved, but importantly it also depends on the amount of language exposure in both languages. Longitudinal patterns suggest that the bilingual differentiation of sound structures increases with age, and as a function of maturation processes similar those of the monolingual children. Observed language interaction effects were either bi-directional, or uniderectional. The direction of language interaction was not necassarily determined by the relative markedness of the two languages in contact. Implications: Evidence of language interaction on the level of sound structure in this study provides support for a unified (bilingual and monolingual) model of language acquisition. The processes of language interaction observed in our data are largely in line with the types of language interaction observed in L2 learners. With regards to clinical implications, we show that in bilingual phonological development language interaction should be considered as a normal but non-obligatory process. Directors of Study: Dr Ineke Mennen, Dr James M. Scobbie
	back to top [Conference Presentations and Publications] Olga Gordeeva, Ineke Mennen, James M. Scobbie (2006) "Language interaction in early bilingual phonology and the continuity in phonological development" Oral paper at the Child Language Seminar, Newcastle upon Tyne, July 19-21, 2006. [abstract] Olga Gordeeva (2006) "Interaction between the Scottish English System of Prominence and Vowel Length", Peer reviewed paper at the Speech Prosody 2006, Dresden (Germany), May 2-5, 2006 [pdf] Olga Gordeeva and James Scobbie (2006) "Phonetic conditioning of word-final ejective stops in the speech of Scottish pre-school children", Poster presented at the Colloqium of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians (BAAP). Edinburgh, 10-12 April 2006. [pdf] Gordeeva, O. (2005). "Laryngeal correlates of the English tense/lax vowel contrast" Oral paper presented at the P-Workshop, Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh, November 15, 2005; and at the departmental research seminar, Speech and Hearing Sciences, QMUC, June 12th, 2005. Gordeeva, O. (2005), "Acquisition of vowel duration conditioning in Russian-Scottish English bilingual children", 5th International Symposium on Bilingualism, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, 20-23 March 2005. in a Special Colloquium "Acquisition of phonological structure and phonetic detail in a bilingual context." [ppt] Gordeeva, O., and Scobbie J.M. (2004), "Non-normative preaspiration of voiceless fricatives in Scottish English: a comparison with Swedish preaspiration ", Colloquium of the British Association of Academic Phoneticians, University of Cambridge, 24-26 March 2004.[pdf] Olga Gordeeva (2004) "The role of language input and structural linguistic differences in simultaneous bilingual acquisition of sound structure: Russian-Scottish English case studies ". A poster presented at "Multidisciplinary approaches to bilingualism" Tutorials in behavioural and brain sciences, Max Plank Institute for Psycholinguistics, Ehzerworld, Netherlands, 28 June-02 July, 2004. Gordeeva , O., Mennen, I. and Scobbie J.M. (2003), "Vowel Duration and Spectral Balance in Scottish English and Russian", proceedings of the 15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Barcelona 3-9 August 2003.[pdf] Gordeeva, O. (2002), "Language mixing in research on bilingual acquisition of prosody: a methodological review", an oral paper at the 12th Annual Conference of the European Second Language Association (Eurosla), University of Basel, Switzerland, 18-21 September 2002.[ppt] back to top [Short CV] Born in Russia, Tver' (ex-USSR, ex-Kalinin) Work: From Nov, 2006 affiliated research fellow at QMUC From Nov, 2006 computational linguist in speech technologies involving text-to-speech at Acapela group, Belgium From April 1, 2005 to Nov 2006 postdoctoral fellowship from Economic and Social Research Grant Coucil- ESRC September 2001 to February 2005 , full-time Ph.D. studentship at Queen Margaret University College, Speech and Hearing Sciences in Edinburgh. Feb 1996 - Apr 2001: Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products, Ieper, Belgium, corporate R&D Language Specialist Russian, coach in Text-to-Speech development. 1994 - 1996: Provinciaal Handels- en Taalinstituut, Onderwijs voor Sociale Promotie in Ghent, Belgium, Russian Language Lecturer. 1995 - 1996: Free University of Brussels, the Institute of Language Education. Russian language Lecturer/p> Education: September 2001 – February 2005, Ph.D. studentship at Queen Margaret University College (Edinburgh, Scotland) at the department of Speech and Hearing Sciences. 1994 - 1995 University of Ghent (Belgium): Post-Graduate in Pedagogical Sciences. 1990 - 1994 University of Ghent (Belgium): M.A. in Slavic Languages and Culture: specialization Russian and Czech. Thesis: "Slavic Version of the Treatise of George Choiroboskos "On Tropes" in the Question of Literature Theory in Kiev Rus'" 1986 - 1989 Tver' State University (Russia), Department of Modern Languages: specialization in Germanic filology: English and German.