Dissatisfied with traditional grading, we developed a grading system to directly assess whether students have mastered course material. We identified the set of skills students need to master in a course, and provided multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of each skill.We describe in detail how we implemented the system for two undergraduate courses, Introductory Phonetics and Phonology I. Our goals were to decrease student stress, increase student learning and make students' study efforts more effective, increase students' metacognitive awareness, promote a growth mindset, encourage students to aim for mastery rather than partial credit, be fairer to students facing structural and institutional disadvantages, reduce our time spent on grading, and facilitate complying with new accreditation requirements.Our own reflections and student feedback indicate that many of these goals were met.

A speech production experiment with electroglottography investigated how voicing is affected by consonants of differing degrees of constriction. Measures of glottal contact [closed quotient (CQ)] and strength of voicing [strength of excitation (SoE)] were used in conditional inference tree analyses. Broadly, the results show that as the degree of constriction increases, both CQ and SoE values decrease, indicating breathier and weaker voicing. Similar changes in voicing quality are observed throughout the course of the production of a given segment. Implications of these results for a greater understanding of source-tract interactions and for the phonological notion of sonority are discussed.

This study investigates the prosody of code-switching in Spanish-Basque bilinguals, which has not been previously documented. Peninsular Spanish and Basque have several prosodic differences, including peak alignment in pitch accents. Spanish has delayed peaks (Estebas Plana & Prieto (2008)), while Basque has early peaks (Elordieta & Hualde (2015)). The current study investigates whether code-switched words are conditioned by prosodic position and whether the peak alignment and f0 maximum of a pitch accent differ between monolingual context (Spanish only) and code-switched contexts. Bilinguals (aged 21-31) from a Basque-dominant region (Lekeitio, n = 3) and a Spanish-dominant region (Bilbao, n = 4) participated in the present study. The data was coded for the following predictor variables: prosodic position, peak alignment, and f0 maximum in pitch accents. Results reveal that code-switches occur almost equally in phrase-medial and final positions. For peak alignment, Lekeitio speakers produced early peaks in both code-switching contexts (Spanish-Basque, Basque-Spanish), which matches monolingual norms for Lekeitio varieties of Spanish and Basque. However, Spanish-dominant speakers also produced early peaks in both code-switching contexts, despite delayed peak norms for Peninsular Spanish. Finally, preliminary results reveal greater f0 during code-switching contexts for Lekeitio speakers only. Further results and implications will be discussed.

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Research on Spanish prosody in adult-directed speech (ADS) (Ortega-Llebaria & Prieto 2005, Ortega-Llebaria & Prieto 2011) shows evidence for three acoustic levels of prominence: stressed and focused, stressed and unfocused, and unstressed and unfocused. We tested whether Spanish infant-directed speech (IDS) contains the same levels of prosodic prominence as ADS. In order to test this hypothesis, 30-minute play sessions between adult Spanish-speaking females of Latin American origin (n = 12) and 12-month old infants were recorded. We extracted target words from the recordings containing stressed and unstressed /a/, /e/, /i/, and /o/ in non-final position. Voicesauce (Shue et al 2011) was then used to obtain acoustic correlates of stress in Spanish: pitch, duration, intensity. We also labeled pitch accents using SpToBI conventions (Estebas Vilaplana & Prieto 2009). Latent class analyses to be performed on the data will determine the number of distinct prominence levels present in Spanish IDS as realized by Latin American speakers.