Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft

Forschungsinteressen

My reseach focus can be summarized as effects of higher-level information on phonetic realizations. Higher-level information such as morphology, syntax, and especially semantics can systematically influence how words and segments are phonetically realized. For more about my research, please visit my personal website.

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.

Lehre

SoSe 2024: Phonetics and Phonology
Grundvorlesung 4 SWS + 2 SWS Tutorial.

WiSe 2023/2024: Psycholinguistics
Grundvorlesung 4 SWS + 2 SWS Tutorial.
Zusammen mit Konstantin Sering gehalten.

WiSe 2023/2024: Morphology and phonetics
Hauptseminar 2 SWS

SoSe 2023: Phonetic realizations in psycholinguistic research
Hauptseminar 2 SWS

SoSe 2023: Ultrasound in phoneitcs
Hauptseminar 2 SWS

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/).