Research Interests:
1. Phonetic fieldwork, developing methods for the documentation of speech communities, phonological and phonetic analyses of field data, phonetic typology of contrast systems.
- DH Whalen & JM McDonough (2019) Under-researched languages: Phonetic results from language archives. In Routledge Handbook of Phonetics, eds. Katz and Assmann.
- JM McDonough (2018) Documenting prosody in three Athabaskan Languages. Proceedings, Acoustical Society of America and Canadian Acoustic Association, Victoria, BC. JASA 2018;133(5):3245.
- D Whalen, JM McDonough (2015). Adaptable models: Taking the laboratory into the field. Annual Review of Linguistics V1.1.
- C Bowern, JM McDonough, K Kelliher (2012). The phonetics of Bardi (Nyulnyulan) Journal of the International Phonetic Association, volume 42, issue 03, pp. 333-351.
- K Iskarous, JM McDonough, DH Whalen (2012). A gestural account of velar contrast: the back fricatives in Navajo, Laboratory Phonology 3.1: 195-210.
- Dene Speech Atlas (online, 2011)
- JM McDonough, V Wood (2008). The stop contrasts of the Athabaskan languages, Journal of Phonetics. V36.3, 427-449.
Online resources
- How to Use Young and Morgan's The Navajo Language (online July 2016) Vimeo. https://bit.ly/2V4adgt
- Dene Speech Atlas. Product of NSF-DEL project Online: July 2013, revised 2018. Website demonstrating the sounds of the Dene language communities in the Mackenzie River Basin Drainage and environs (NSF #0853929). http://www.sas.rochester.edu/lin/DeneSpeechAtlas/
2. Morphology. The structure of the lexicon in complex morphologies. The phonetics of word formation. Word&Pattern morphology. Navajo and Dene word structure and formation.
- Olivier Bonami, Joyce McDonough and Sacha Beniamine (2017) 'When segmentation helps: Implicative structure and morph boundaries in the Navajo verb.", ISMo 2017, Lille France.
- LabEx Chair, Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris 3. The Structure of the Navajo Verbal Complex. 4 lectures. April- May 2017.
- JM McDonough (2014). The Dene verb: how phonetics supports morphology. In Proceedings of 18th Workshop on Structure and Constituency in the Languages of the Americas, University of California, Berkeley, April 5-7, 2013.
3. The neural coding of speech sounds. With Laural Carney (BME and Neurobiology & Anatomy).
- L Carney & JM McDonough (2018). Nonlinear auditory models yield new insights into representations of vowels Attention Perception and Psychophysics. DOI: 10.3758/s13414-018-01644-w.
- Carney LH, Li T, McDonough JM (2015 Jul). Speech Coding in the Brain: Representation of Vowel Formants by Midbrain Neurons Tuned to Sound Fluctuations eNeuro. JDOI: http://bit.ly/2eAN2p8
- LH Carney, JM McDonough (2012). Predicting discrimination of formant frequencies in vowels with a computational model of the auditory midbrain, IEEE Proceedings, Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, Princeton NJ.
I focus particularly on the phonetic and phonological structure of endangered or under-resourced languages and dialects, to attempt to providing baseline descriptions of these systems as a ground for further work. I am especially interested in languages with complex morphologies, and the representation of linguistic forms in the brain.