Penelope Howe

Penelope Howe received her PhD in Linguistics from Rice University in January 2017. Her dissertation explored the possibility of ongoing tonogenesis in a group of dialects in the Austronesian language Malagasy, examining variation in the use of pitch and modal voicing/voice onset time cues in manifesting the voiced/voiceless consonant contrast. During a cumulative eleven months in Madagascar, she collected an enormous amount of acoustic phonetic and perceptual data, which would have been impossible to analyze in a reasonable amount of time without the assistance of Praat scripting. She is eager to share the knowledge and skills gained through this process with Summer Institute attendees, so that they may also come to appreciate the joys and benefits of working with Praat while minimizing the inevitable frustrations of the learning curve.