Elizabeth Zsiga

Elizabeth Cook Zsiga (/ˈziːɡə/)^[1] (b. 1964) is a linguist whose work focuses on phonology and phonetics. She is a Professor of Linguistics at Georgetown University.

Zsiga completed her Ph.D. at Yale University in 1993 as a student of Louis M. Goldstein, and affiliated with Haskins Laboratories, with a dissertation titled Features, gestures, and the temporal aspects of phonological organization.^[2] She has been on the faculty at Georgetown since 1994, as Assistant Professor (1994-1999), Associate Professor (1999-2011), and Professor (since 2011).^[3][4]

Zsiga's research interests have been wide-ranging and have been supported by numerous awards and federal grants from the National Science Foundation, including projects on the conservation of endangered languages (2007-2008),^[5] on the phonetics of consonants in Setswana and Sebirwa (2010 and 2011–2014),^[6][7] and as director for doctoral projects on the phonetics of Burmese tones (2009),^[8] consonant weakening in Florentine Italian (2007),^[9] acquisition of tone in a second language (2015),^[10] neutralization of phonemic contrasts in Dutch and Afrikaans (2019),^[11] and iconicity in American Sign Language (2020).^[12]

She is the author of a well-received introductory textbook to phonetics and phonology (Zsiga 2013),^[13][14] as well as a textbook on the phonology-phonetics interface (Zsiga 2021).

• Zsiga, Elizabeth C. (2013). The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics and Phonology. Wiley-Blackwell. ISBN 978-1-4051-9103-6.
• Zsiga, Elizabeth C. (2021). The Phonology/Phonetics Interface. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-54264-7.
• Zsiga, Elizabeth C.; Kramer, R.; Boyer, O., eds. (2015). Languages in Africa: Multilingualism, Education, and Language Policy. Georgetown University Press. ISBN 978-1-62616-153-5.

• Zsiga, Elizabeth C. (2011). "External Sandhi in a Second Language: The Phonetics and Phonology of Obstruent Nasalization in Korean-Accented English". Language. 87 (2): 289–345. doi:10.1353/lan.2011.0031. S2CID 144944548.
• Zsiga, Elizabeth C. (2000). "Phonetic alignment constraints: consonant overlap and palatalization in English and Russian". Journal of Phonetics. 28 (1): 69–102. doi:10.1006/jpho.2000.0109.
• Zsiga, E. (1995). "An acoustic and electropalatographic study of lexical and postlexical palatalization in American English". In Connell, B.; Arvaniti, A. (eds.). Phonology and Phonetic Evidence: Papers in Laboratory Phonology IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 282–302. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511554315.020. ISBN 978-0-521-48259-2.