Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft

Research interests

My current research project is involved with a relationship between word distributions and language performances. This project was initiated with the acceptability judgment, which has been used extensively as a research tool in many branches of the thoretical linguistics and can be regarded as one of the linguistic performances (e.g. lexical decision task). The project is not extended to eye-movement patterns and pronunciation durations. Overall, the results obtained in the project indicate (i) that word distributions and their quantified measures (e.g. entropy) can be used as a tool to investigate linguistic predictions and (ii) that some characteristics in a language performance are influenced and at least partially determined by distributional characteristics.

Recent Publications & Preprints

Motoki Saito and Ruben van de Vijver (submitted). How meaning and predictability affect the duration of japanese homophonous words. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/y8h4b

Motoki Saito, Fabian Tomaschek, Ching-Chu Sun, and R. Harald Baayen. (2024). Articulatory effects of frequency modulated by semantics. In Marcel Schlechtweg (Ed.), Interfaces of phonetics (pp. 125–154). De Gruyter Mouton. https://doi.org/doi:10.1515/9783110783452-005

For more about the publications, please visit my personal website.

Recent & Upcoming Presentations

Motoki Saito and Ruben van de Vijver. Durational differences among Japanese homophones as a function of their meanings. At the workshop "Morphological variation" in the 47th annual conference of the German Linguistic Society (DGfS 47), Mainz, Germany, March 4, 2025.

Motoki Saito. Contrasting phonetic effects of morphological boundaries for vowel and consonant suffixes. At the 13th International Seminar on Speech Production (ISSP 2024), Autrans, France, May 16, 2024.

For more about the presentations, please visit my personal website.

Teaching

Summer 2024: Phonetics and Phonology
Lecture (4 hours per week) + Tutorial (2 hours per week).

Winter 2023/2024: Psycholinguistics
Lecture (4 hours per week) + Tutorial (2 hours per week).
Together with Konstantin Sering.

Winter 2023/2024: Morphology and phonetics
Seminar (2 hours per week)

Summer 2023: Phonetic realizations in psycholinguistic research
Seminar (2 hours per week)

Summer 2023: Ultrasound in phoneitcs
Seminar (2 hours per week)

Software

discriminative_lexicon_model (Author and Maintainer):
A python package for training, i.e., estimating the component matrices of, a Discriminative Lexicon Model (Baayen et al., 2019) and for deriving some measures from the model. The package is available on PyPI and the project is found in https://github.com/quantling/discriminative_lexicon_model

pyult (Author and Maintainer):
A python package for the whole-image analysis on ultrasound images. Some of the functionalities of the package are integrated in another python package designed for a broader range of analysis on ultrasound images, called "Speech Articulation ToolKIT - SATKIT" developed by Dr. Pertti Palo. The package is available on PyPI and the project is found in https://github.com/msaito8623/pyult

Speech Articulation ToolKIT - SATKIT (Contributor):
A python package for a wide range of analysis on ultrasound images. The project was founded and is maintained by Dr. Pertti Palo (https://taurlin.org/).