Marco Fonseca
(him/his)
Visiting Assistant Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Japanese
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Olin Hall 162
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509-522-4318
Marco holds a PhD in Linguistics with a concentration in Second Language Acquisition and Teacher Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), as well as a Graduate Certificate in Computational Linguistics from the same university. To complete his dissertation, Marco received a Japanese Studies Fellowship from the Japan Foundation to conduct research at the Electrical Engineering and Information Systems Department of the University of Tokyo (UTokyo). He was born and raised in Brazil and has also completed an MA in Linguistics from UTokyo, which was entirely conducted in Japanese. Marco is also an avid language learner, being fully proficient in Portuguese, English, Japanese and Spanish. He can also communicate in German and Korean.
Ph.D. Linguistics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
August 2023
M.A. Linguistics
University of Tokyo
March 2015
B.A. Linguistics
Federal University of Minas Gerais
December 2011
Recent publication
2023 Fonseca, Marco. The perception of Japanese lexical contrasts by L2 learners: the role of the lexicon. In: Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Phonetic Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic.
Recent invited talk
2023 Fonseca, Marco. The acquisition of the sounds of Japanese: experimentation and computational modeling. Purdue University, IN, USA.
Conference presentations
2023 Fonseca, Marco. Japanese devoiced vowel tongue movement: acoustics and articulatory mapping. Poster presented at the 184th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Hilton Magnificent Mile, Chicago, IL, USA.
2023 Fonseca, Marco. Using bilingual and monolingual LSTM RNNs to model Japanese phonological rules. Oral presentation at the 15th ILLS Conference, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL, USA.
2022 Fonseca, Marco. Phoneme embeddings vs. distinctive features using LSTM RNNs: evidence from Japanese). Oral presentation at the MidPhon 27, held at Washington University at St. Louis, MO.
2022 Fonseca, Marco. 機械学習を用いて英語と日本語の 音素配列 のモデル化 (Modeling Japanese and English phonotactics using machine learning). Oral presentation at the Tokyo Circle of Phonology, held online.
2021 Fonseca, Marco. 日本語における音変異:ニューラルネットワークのモデル化 (Modeling Japanese soun dvariation through neural networks). Oral presentation at the 第 16 回音韻論フェスタ (Phonology Festa 16), held online.
2021 Fonseca, Marco. Using monolingual and bilingual neural networks to model Japanese phonotactics. Poster presentation at the 25th Annual MidPhon Conference, held online
2020 Fonseca, Marco. Dell, Brennan. Modeling optional sound variation and obligatory gesture assimilation using LSTM RNNs. Neural network models for articulatory gestures - Satellite workshop for 17th Conference on Laboratory Phonology, held online.
2019 Fonseca, Marco. An ultrasound study of Japanese vowel devoicing. Oral presentation at the Tokyo Circle of Phonologists, Tokyo, Japan.
2019 Fonseca, Marco. The perception of Japanese pitch accent and segmental contrasts by L2 learners. Poster presentation at the 2019 International Conference on Phonetics and Phonology at the National Institute of Japanese Language and Linguistics in Tachikawa, Tokyo, Japan.
2021 Japanese Studies Fellowship, Japan Foundation.
2017 Student Leadership Award, Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
2017 Best Japanese Language Teaching Assistant, Department of East Asian Lan- guages and Cultures, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
2012-2015 Research scholarship, Ministry of Education, Sports, Culture, and Technology of Japan.
Phonetics/Phonology, Second Language Acquisition, Computational Linguistics