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So-called gender-neutral nouns like Freund*innen, Redakteur_in or AutorInnen are suspected to not fit into the linguistic system. This paper argues that if these forms are pronounced with a glottal stop (e.g. Freund[ʔ]innen), only small changes in the grammar are needed to integrate them. It is shown that the suffix [ʔ ɪn] in these derivatives can be analysed as a phonological word and therefore could be a new suffix that is added to the grammar. The phonological structure of its derivatives is shown to be just like the phonological structure of many native German derived nouns as many suffixes form a phonological word of their own. Also, the insertion of [ʔ] in these derived wordforms can be explained by the status of the suffix as a phonological word. Hence, it is argued that speakers do not ignore the regularities of the grammar when they use gender-neutral nouns with [ʔ ɪn], but rather work with these rules to create new words with new meanings.
U radu se opisuju posebnosti samoglasničkih, suglasničkih i naglasnih jezičnih značajka govora Medveje te se ističu neke jezične različitosti u odnosu na govor Kastva. Oba govora pripadaju sjeveroistočnomu istarskom poddijalektu ekavskoga dijalekta čakavskoga narječja. Rad se temelji na vlastitim terenskim istraživanjima Kastva i Medveje iz 2005. godine, na opsežnim fonološkim terenskim istraživanjima koje je prije petnaestak godina proveo dr. sc. Mijo Lončarić te na dijelu zapisa objavljenih u recentnoj dijalektološkoj literaturi.
This paper offers an extensive analysis of the reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European word-initial cluster *sk- in Proto-Slavic. It is argued that the regular reflex of this cluster is the Proto-Slavic *x-, but that *sk- was analogously re-introduced in a great number of cases under the influence of prefixed forms and cases where forms with and without the so-called "s-mobile" co-existed in Slavic. This conclusion is in accordance with the fact that *x- < *sk- is far more common in derivationally isolated words that do not occur with prefixes.
Podravski kajkavski dijalekt
(2011)
This paper presents doublets in the phonology and accentuation of a Kajkavian dialect in central Croatia, where all three major Croatian groups of dialects meet. Inconsistencies in the vowel and consonant systems are also noted. The second part considers the accentual system, its units and their distribution. Many fluctuations were noted, even with respect to retractions and special Kajkavian features. These are explained through influences of neihbouring local dialects and from the urban dialect of Karlovac and Standard Croatian.
Rezension zu A. Celinić; I. Kurtović Budja; A. Čilaš Šimpraga; Ž. Jozić: Prinosi hrvatskoj dijalektnoj fonologiji. Split – Zagreb: Književni krug Split – Institut za hrvatski jezik i jezikoslovlje, 2010.
Im folgenden Artikel wird der Versuch unternommen, die Hauptmerkmale der phonetischen Forschung in der slowakischen Germanistik (teils aus kontrastiver Sicht) in den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten zu dokumentieren.
Aus verständlichen Gründen verzichten wir dabei auf Vollständigkeit: Die Ergebnisse der phonetischen Arbeiten sind in bibliographischen Abteilungen der Bibliotheken bzw. im Internet zusammengetragen. In unserer Analyse berücksichtigen wir nur diejenigen AutorInnen, die wir aus anderen slowakischen Universitäten kennen und mit denen wir im regelmäßigen Kontakt sind. Es handelt sich um folgende PhonetikerInnen: Viera Chebenová (UKF Nitra), Zuzana Bohušová (UMB Banská Bystrica), Viera Lagerová (Trnavská univerzita) und Anna Džambová (Prešovská univerzita). Es wird sich in der Zukunft sicher die Möglichkeit ergeben, die aktuelle Situation gründlich zu recherchieren (z. B. im Rahmen eines Projektes), die Liste der AutorInnen und ihrer Werke zu vervollständigen, zu analysieren und zu diskutieren. Deren niedrige Zahl beruht auf der Tatsache, dass die deutsche Phonetik nicht zu den bevorzugten Gebieten der germanistischen Linguistik in der Slowakei gehört (auf dieses Problem wiesen wir in unseren Beiträgen der letzten Jahre mehrmals hin). In der Slowakei gibt es zahlreiche GermanistInnen, die sich eher für Gebiete wie Lexikographie, Lexikologie, Phraseologie, Grammatik, Didaktik, Translatologie, Pragmatik interessieren.
The existence of complex clauses in the Amazonian language Pirahã has been controversially debated. We present a novel analysis of field data demonstrating the existence of complex clauses in Pirahã. The data concern the tone of the morpheme 'sai' and stem from a field experiment where a second language speaker of Pirahã presented sentences and Pirahã speakers were asked to correct them saying the correct sentence alound. The experimental items contained the morpheme 'sai' in two different clausal environments: a nominalizer and a conditional environment according to Everett's 1986 description. Our phonetic analysis shows an effect clausal clausal environment on the pitch of 'sai'. The native Pirahã speakers pronounced conditional 'sai' with lower pitch than nominalizer 'sai'. We show furthermore that the experimenters pitch on 'sai' shows the opposite pattern from that of the native Pirahã speakers and hence the Pirahã's pitch could not just have been copied. The effect of the clausal environment on the tone of 'sai' can be explained by a complex clause analysis of Pirahã, while existing alternative proposals do not explain the difference.
Alle germanischen Sprachen haben in den nachchristlichen Jahrhunderten eine phonologische Umlautphase durchlaufen, allerdings mit je unterschiedlichen Resultaten. Dieser Umgang mit den Umlautprodukten wurde bisher nie vergleichend in den Blick genommen; vielmehr bekommt man in jeder Einzelphilologie den Eindruck, als habe die Umlautentwicklung nur so und nicht anders verlaufen können. Erst die historisch-kontrastive Perspektive erweist, dass sich drei Pfade systematisieren lassen: Der Umlaut wird konserviert (Isländisch), er wird eliminiert (Englisch, Niederländisch) – Schwedisch nimmt hier eine Zwischenposition ein –, oder er wird funktionalisiert (grammatikalisiert) und damit morphologisch ausgedehnt (Deutsch, Luxemburgisch).
Im Folgenden werden diese drei Wege nicht nur beschrieben, sondern auch begründet. Der konsequente Sprachwandelvergleich ermöglicht dabei das Verständnis von Zusammenhängen und erlaubt es, aus den Einzelphilologien abgeleitete Annahmen zu revidieren.
Ich möchte […] drei Beispiele für den produktiven Dialog zwischen Historischer Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachtypologie liefern: 1. Den phonologisch-typologischen Wandel des Deutschen von einer Silben- zu einer Wortsprache, 2. die frühnhd. 'Justierung' der Abfolge grammatischer Kategorien am Verb gemäß der universellen Relevanzskala, und 3. die Entwicklung unseres Höflichkeitssystems am Beispiel der Anredepronomen. Weder liefere ich Neues noch kann ich ins Detail gehen. Es geht hier nur darum, für die gegenseitige Wahrnehmung und Zusammenarbeit linguistischer Disziplinen zu werben.
Contemporary German abounds in doubtful cases where linking elements alternate with zero elements, such as Seminar(+s?+)arbeit 'term paper', Respekt(+s?+)person 'person who commands respect'. This variation indicates a profound language change in the course of which the linking +s+ has spread continuously since Early New High German and is replacing the zero element more and more often. Today, +s+ is the most productive, progressive and most frequently occurring linking element. In this paper, we provide an explanation for the doubtful cases. Most often, the linking +s+ depends directly on the phonological quality of the first part of the compound: the worse its phonological structure, the more likely the occurrence of the linking +s+. It occurs most regularly after first parts of compounds containing a suffix or an unstressed prefix (Verkáuf+s+gespräch 'sales conversation'), while words with an ideal phonological structure (monosyllabic or trochaic words) rarely attract the linking +s+. The variation concentrates on compounds whose first parts feature a stressed prefix (Éinkauf(+s?+)führer 'shopping guide'). There is, however, a further factor which leads to fluctuation in the occurrence of the linking +s+. In cases where the second part of synthetic compounds such as Auftrag(+s?+)geber 'client' contain a high degree of verbality, the linking +s+ blurs the syntactic relation between the immediate constituents, strengthening the morphological character of the compound.
Zu dem Strauß der Bindestrichlinguistiken gesellt sich derzeit ein weiteres, besonders interessantes und vielversprechendes Exemplar, die sog. Zweifelsfall-Linguistik. Ihre Entstehung kann man mit dem "Linguistik online"-Heft "Sprachliche Zweifelsfälle. Theorie und Empirie" [...] auf das Jahr 2003 datieren. [...]
Aus historisch-linguistischer Perspektive handelt es sich sehr häufig um Fälle sich gegenwärtig vollziehenden Sprachwandels, d.h. was heute an seismischen Bewegungen registriert wird, hat seinen Herd, um in diesem Bild zu bleiben, oft im Frühneuhochdeutschen oder noch früher. [...] Gerade für die zukünftigen LehrerInnen ist es wichtig, von der richtig/falsch-Zentriertheit von Zweifelsfällen wegzukommen und stattdessen der Ratio dieses Phänomens näherzukommen (um dann bessere Anleitungen geben zu können). In Veranstaltungen zu Zweifelsfällen erlangt man übrigens eine beträchtliche diachrone Tiefe, d.h. die Bereitschaft, sich in das Problem, seine Genese und seine Hintergründe einzuarbeiten, ist erfreulich hoch. Interessant (und noch nicht erforscht) ist dabei die unterschiedliche Salienz grammatischer Zweifelsfälle: Während die Fugensetzung sofort als Zweifelsfall erkannt und bestätigt wird, ist es bei der schwankenden Flexion zweier koordinierter Adjektive im Dativ ohne Determinans ("unter großem finanziellem?/finanziellen? Aufwand") anders. Auch wenn die Korpora die Schwankung zwischen Parallel- und Wechselflexion zweifelsfrei als Zweifelsfall ausweisen (ca. zwei Drittel Wechselflexion, ca. ein Drittel Parallelflexion), so erreicht diese Flexionsunsicherheit keinen hohen Bewusstheitsgrad. Die höchste Salienz erreichen übrigens orthographische Zweifelsfälle [...], danach Wortbildungsprobleme wie die (Un-)Trennbarkeit von Präfixen vom Typ "gedownloadet/downgeloadet".
Zum Informationsangebot deutscher Aussprachewörterbücher für tschechische Germanistikstudierende
(2013)
Aussprachewörterbücher stellen für nichtmuttersprachliche Germanistikstudierende nach wie vor eine der wichtigsten Informationsquellen über die gesprochene Form der deutschen Gegenwartssprache dar. Beim Vergleich der gängigen Aussprachewörterbücher des Deutschen kann man jedoch gravierende Unterschiede feststellen, die einen Nichtmuttersprachler leicht zu desorientieren (wenn nicht gerade zu verwirren) vermögen. Im Beitrag werden die zwei gebräuchlichsten Aussprachewörterbücher der deutschen Sprache (DUDEN Das Aussprachewörterbuch und De Gruyter Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch) im Hinblick auf das darin enthaltene Informationsangebot für tschechische Germanistikstudierende verglichen. In den Vordergrund tritt somit die Darstellung der für tschechische Deutschstudierende problematischen phonetischen Erscheinungen. Des Weiteren wird folgenden Aspekten Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt: konzeptionelle Ausgangspunkte, Umfang und Stichwörterauswahl, theoretische Beschreibung des phonetisch-phonologischen Systems des Deutschen sowie der deutschen Standardlautung, Aktualitätsbezug, Beschreibung von regionalen Varietäten, Berücksichtigung der Phonostilistik usw.
This exercise explores the historical relationship between tone, aspiration, prefixes and stem initial consonants in Tibetan. (The stem-initial consonant is underlined in those words that have prefixes or initial clusters; [ts], [tsh], [tç], [tçh], etc., all count as single consonants.) Other phonetic developments are also explored.
Die vorliegende Arbeit widmet sich der phonetischen Motivation phonologischer Palatalisierungsprozesse, bei welchen Vorderzungenvokoide die Palatalisierung (bzw. Affrizierung) vorangehender Plosive bewirken. Durch akustische Analysen zu deutschen und bulgarischen stimmlosen alveolaren und velaren Verschlußlauten wird der Einfluß nachfolgender vorderer Vokoide und des tiefen Vokals /a/ auf die geräuschähnliche Phase nach der plosiven Verschlußlösung der Konsonanten untersucht. Zum Zwecke der Überprüfung einer nach universellen phonologischen Prinzipien formulierten Hierarchie der wahrscheinlichen Inputkandidaten für Palatalisierungen werden akustische Messungen zur Zeitdauer und zu den spektralen Eigenschaften des konsonantischen Segments in wortinitialen Konsonant-Vokoid-Sequenzen vorgestellt. Die Ergebnisse der Studie unterstützen nur teilweise die vorgeschlagene Hierarchiehypothese und zeigen, daß sprachspezifische Besonderheiten einen Einfluß auf die Anordnung der Elemente der Hierarchie ausüben.
As work like McCarthy (2002: 128) notes, pre-Optimality Theory (OT) phonology was primarily concerned with representations and theories of subsegmental structure. In contrast, the role of representations and choice of structural models has received little attention in OT. Some central representational issues of the pre-OT era have, in fact, become moot in OT (McCarthy 2002: 128). Further, as work like Baković (2007) notes, even for assimilatory processes where representation played a central role in the pre-OT era, constraint interaction now carries the main explanatory burden. Indeed, relatively few studies in OT (e.g., Rose 2000; Hargus & Beavert 2006; Huffmann 2005, 2007; Morén 2006) have argued for the importance of phonological representations. This paper intends to contribute to this work by reanalyzing a set of processes related to vowel harmony in Shimakonde, a Bantu language spoken in Mozambique and Tanzania. These processes are of particular interest, as Liphola’s (2001) study argues that they are derivationally opaque and so not amenable to an OT analysis. I show that the opacity disappears given the proper choice of representations for vowel features and a metrical harmony domain.
Das hethitische Phonem /xw/
(2014)
In the Hittite phonological system there was a labialized velar fricative /xw/ beside the plain velar fricative /x/ parallel to the opposition between the velar stops /kw/ and /k/. The frequent syllable /xwa/ was spelled either hu-(u) or hu-wa. Evidence from the frequency of words with initial hu in the lexicon, from spelling variations and from ablaut alternations is presented to demonstrate the existence of /xw/. It is suggested that Hittite /xw/ regularly corresponds to the reflexes of *w in the non-Anatolian Indo-European languages.
The collection of papers in this volume presents results of a collaborative project between the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, the Zentrum für allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie und Universalienforschung (ZAS) in Berlin, and the University of Leiden. All three institutions have a strong interest in the linguistics of Bantu languages, and in 2003 decided to set up a network to compare results and to provide a platform for on-going discussion of different topics on which their research interests converged. The project received funding from the British Academy International Networks Programme, and from 2003 to 2006 seven meetings were held at the institutions involved under the title Bantu Grammar: Description and Theory, indicating the shared belief that current research in Bantu is best served by combining the description of new data with theoretically informed analysis. During the life-time of the network, and partly in conjunction with it, larger externally funded Bantu research projects have been set up at all institutions: projects on word-order and morphological marking and on phrasal phonology in Leiden, on pronominal reference, agreement and clitics in Romance and Bantu at SOAS, and on focus in Southern Bantu languages at ZAS. The papers in this volume provide a sampling of the work developed within the network and show, or so we think, how fruitful the sharing of ideas over the last three years has been. While the current British Academy-funded network is coming to an end in 2006, we hope that the cooperative structures we have established will continue to develop - and be expanded - in the future, providing many future opportunities to exchange findings and ideas about Bantu linguistics.
Low- dimensional and speaker-independent linear vocal tract parametrizations can be obtained using the 3-mode PARAFAC factor analysis procedure first introduced by Harshman et al. (1977) and discussed in a series of subsequent papers in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America (Jackson (1988), Nix et al. (1996), Hoole (1999), Zheng et al. (2003)). Nevertheless, some questions of importance have been left unanswered, e.g. none of the papers using this method has provided a consistent interpretation of the terms usually referred to as "speaker weights". This study attempts an exploration of what influences their reliability as a first step towards their consistent interpretation. With this in mind, we undertook a systematic comparison of the classical PARAFAC1 algorithm with a relaxed version, of it, PARAFAC2. This comparison was carried out on two different corpora acquired by the articulograph, which varied in vowel qualities, consonantal contexts, and the paralinguistic features accent and speech rate. The difference between these statistical approaches can grossly be described as follows: In PARAFAC1, observation units pertain to the same set of variables and the observation units are comparable. In PARAFAC2, observations pertain to the same set of variables, but observation units are not comparable. Such a situation can be easily conceived in a situation such as we are describing: The operationalization we took relies on the comparability of fleshpoint data acquired from different speakers, which need not be a good assumption due to influences like sensor placement and morphological conditions.
In particular, the comparison between the two different approaches is carried out by means of so-called "leverages" on different component matrices originating in regression analysis, calculated as v = diag(A(A A)−1A ) and delivering information on how "influential" a particular loading matrix is for the model. This analysis could potentially be carried out component by component, but we confined ourselves to effects on the global factor structure. For vowels, the most influential loadings are those for the tense cognates of non-palatal vowels. For speakers, the most prominent result is the relative absence of effects of the paralinguistic variables. Results generally indicate that there is quite little influence of the model specification (i.e. PARAFAC1 or PARAFAC2) on vowel and subject components. The patterns for the articulators indicate that there are strong differences between speakers with respect to the most influential measurement as revealed by PARAFAC2: In particular, the most influential y-contribution is the tongue-back for some talkers and the tongue-dorsum for other speakers. With respect to the speaker weights, again, the leverage patterns are very similar for both PARAFAC-versions. These patterns converge with the results of the loading plots, where the articulator profiles seem to be most altered by the use of PARAFAC2. These findings, in general, are interpreted as evidence for the reliability of the PARAFAC1 speaker weights.
This work investigates laryngeal and supralaryngeal correlates of the voicing contrast in alveolar obstruent production in German. It further studies laryngealoral co-ordination observed for such productions. Three different positions of the obstruents are taken into account: the stressed, syllable initial position, the post-stressed intervocalic position, and the post-stressed word final position. For the latter the phonological rule of final devoicing applies in German. The different positions are chosen in order to study the following hypotheses:
1. The presence/absence of glottal opening is not a consistent correlate of the voicing contrast in German.
2. Supralaryngeal correlates are also involved in the contrast.
3. Supralaryngeal correlates can compensate for the lack of distinction in laryngeal adjustment.
Including the word final position is motivated by the question whether neutralization in word final position would be complete or whether some articulatory residue of the contrast can be found.
Two experiments are carried out. The first experiment investigates glottal abduction in co-ordination with tongue-palate contact patterns by means of simultaneous recordings of transillumination, fiberoptic films and Electropalatography (EPG). The second experiment focuses on supralaryngeal correlates of alveolar stops studied by means of Electromagnetic Articulography (EMA) simultaneously with EPG. Three German native speakers participated in both recordings. Results of this study provide evidence that the first hypothesis holds true for alveolar stops when different positions are taken into account. In fricative production it is also confirmed since voiceless and voiced fricatives are most of the time realised with glottal abduction. Additionally, supralaryngeal correlates are involved in the voicing contrast under two perspectives. First, laryngeal and supralaryngeal movements are well synchronised in voiceless obstruent production, particularly in the stressed position. Second, supralaryngeal correlates occur especially in the post-stressed intervocalic position. Results are discussed with respect to the phonetics-phonology interface, to the role of timing and its possible control, to the interarticulatory co-ordination, and to stress as 'localised hyperarticulation'.
This special issue of the ZAS Papers in Linguistics contains a collection of papers of the French-German Thematic Summerschool on "Cognitive and physical models of speech production, and speech perception and of their interaction".
Organized by Susanne Fuchs (ZAS Berlin), Jonathan Harrington (IPdS Kiel), Pascal Perrier (ICP Grenoble) and Bernd Pompino-Marschall (HUB and ZAS Berlin) and funded by the German-French University in Saarbrücken this summerschool was held from September 19th till 24th 2004 at the coast of the Baltic Sea at the Heimvolkshochschule Lubmin (Germany) with 45 participants from Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy and Canada. The scientific program of this summerschool that is reprinted at the end of this volume included 11 key-note presentations by invited speakers, 21 oral presentations and a poster session (8 presentations). The names and addresses of all participants are also given in the back matter of this volume.
All participants was offered the opportunity to publish an extended version of their presentation in the ZAS Papers in Linguistics. All submitted papers underwent a review and an editing procedure by external experts and the organizers of the summerschool. As it is the case in a summerschool, papers present either works in progress, or works at a more advanced stage, or tutorials. They are ordered alphabetically by their first author's name, fortunately resulting in the fact that this special issue starts out with the paper that won the award as best pre-doctoral presentation, i.e. Sophie Dupont, Jérôme Aubin and Lucie Ménard with "A study of the McGurk effect in 4 and 5-year-old French Canadian children".
Tento článek se zabývá následující otázkou: Jsou [Ə] a [ɐ] německé fonémy nebo ne? Hlavní myšlenka se zabývá rozmezím testu minimálních párů jako metody k určení fonematického system jazyka. Tento test je úspěšný do té doby, pokud nejsou dané prvky přesně předvídatelné. Ty jsou předpověditelné, pokud existují fonologická pravidla, která vysvětlují výskyt fónu. Zde se argumentuje, ţe /Ə/ je německý foném, ale [ɐ] není.
Demonstrationen von Gefühlsexpressionen : Exemplarische Untersuchungen an authentischen Gesprächen
(2010)
V ĉlánku jsou analyzovány tři příklady slovně vyjádřených citŧ. A) Případ spoleĉného rozhořĉení přispívající ke stabilizaci identity skupiny se stoupajícím a zase klesajícím prŧběhem; B) Vyprávění, ve kterém se bývalé rozĉilení vypravěĉky odráţí v mruĉení (mh, mh); C) Líĉení hrozivé přírodní události. Cílem je popsat spoleĉné pŧsobení gramatických, lexikálních a zvláště prozodických znakŧ promluvy.
V lingvistickém výzkumu byla malá pozornost věnována onomatopoickým výrazŧm ĉasto uţívaným zvláště v komiksech a v dětské literatuře jako nástroj k vyjádření emocí. Ĉlánek, jehoţ cílem je vyplnit mezeru ve výzkumu, nejprve podává přehled o vztazích mezi onomatopoi a emocemi. Autor zdŧrazňuje, ţe konkrétní realizace onomatopoických slov je v kaţdém jazyce jiná a závisí na jazykových konvencích. Následně jsou srovnána německá a ĉeská onomatopoická slovesa s emoĉními konotacemi. Srovnání ukazuje širokou škálu rozdílŧ, které se týkají nejen formálních aspektŧ, ale také významu těchto sloves. Závěrem vyplývá, ţe emoce jsou vázány na jazykový kontext, a proto nemohou být přesně přeloţeny.
Cìlem tohoto článku je ukázat, ņe je nutné při jazykovém rozboru středověkého německého textu, chceme-li se alespoņ přiblìņit jeho zvukové podobě, vņdy vycházet přìmo z rukopisu. Normalizovaná edice totiņ často stìrá fonetické zvláńtnosti a namnoze tìm dokonce ztěņuje i porozuměnì. Z analýzy nańeho textu např. jasně výplývajì rozdìy ve fonetické realizaci dvojhlásek ai/ay a ei/ey vzniklých kontrakcì -age- a -ege-, které K. Bartsch ve své edici přepisuje jako ei, a tìm zvyńuje počet homografických slov. Naproti tomu rozlińovánì s (germánské s) a z(z) (germánské t) a restaurace počátečnìho s ve skupině sw- nemá v jazyce rukopisu ņádnou oporu a archaizuje tak neņádoucìm způsobem jazykovou podobu celého textu.
Článek pojednává o zlomku lékařského receptu z 15. stoletì, který je v současné době uchováván pod signaturou I E a 16 v Oddělenì rukopisů a starých tisků Knihovny Národnìho muzea v Praze, a zabývá se dìlčìmi aspekty textové analýzy v oblasti grafematiky, fonetiky, morfologie, syntaxe a slovnì zásoby.
It has been established since Kanerva’s work that focus conditions phrasing – directly or indirectly – in several other Bantu languages, e.g. Chimwiini (Kisseberth 2007, Downing 2002, Kisseberth & Abasheikh 2004), Xhosa (Jokweni 1995, Zerbian 2004), Chitumbuka (Downing 2006, 2007), Zulu (Cheng & Downing 2006, Downing 2007), Bemba (Kula 2007), etc.
In this paper, I will argue that focus also conditions phrasing in Shingazidja, a Bantu language3 spoken on Grande Comore (or Ngazidja, the largest island of the Comoros).
Many works have been dedicated to the tonology of Shingazidja. The bases of the system were firstly identified by Tucker & Bryan (1970) and reanalyzed by Philippson (1988). Later, Cassimjee & Kisseberth (1989, 1992, 1993, 1998) provide a very convincing analysis of the whole system of the language, and my own research (Patin 2007a) shows a great correspondence with their results. However, little attention has been paid by these authors or others (Jouannet 1989, Rey 1990, Philippson 2005) to the phonology-pragmatics interface, especially on the relation between focus and phrasing. This paper thus proposes to explore this question. It will be claimed that focus, beside syntax, has an influence on phrasing in Shingazidja.
Tone as a distinctive feature used to differentiate not only words but also clause types, is a characteristic feature of Bantu languages. In this paper we show that Bemba relatives can be marked with a low tone in place of a segmental relative marker. This low tone strategy of relativization, which imposes a restrictive reading of relatives, manifests a specific phonological phrasing that can be differentiated from that of non-restrictives. The paper shows that the resultant phonological phrasing favours a head-raising analysis of relativization. In this sense, phonology can be shown to inform syntactic analyses.
We present the results of an experimental study which targets prosodic correlates of subclausal quotation marks. We found that written sentences containing passages enclosed by quotation marks were read aloud in a manner that significantly differs in prosody from spoken realizations of corresponding disquoted counterparts. However, we also observed that such prosodic marking of subclausal quotation wasn't strong enough to survive subsequent back-translation into written language: there was no correlation between the presence/absence of quotation marks in the original written examples, and the presence/absence of quotation marks in corresponding back-translations from oral renditions. We investigated three different kinds of uses of quotation marks and found no systematic difference between them with respect to prosodic marking.
Rate effects on aerodynamics of intervocalic stops : evidence from real speech data and model data
(2008)
This paper is a first attempt towards a better understanding of the aerodynamic properties during speech production and their potential control. In recent years, studies on intraoral pressure in speech have been rather rare, and more studies concern the air flow development. However, the intraoral pressure is a crucial factor for analysing the production of various sounds.
In this paper, we focus on the intraoral pressure development during the production of intervocalic stops.
Two experimental methodologies are presented and confronted with each other: real speech data recorded for four German native speakers, and model data, obtained by a mechanical replica which allows reproducing the main physical mechanisms occurring during phonation. The two methods are presented and applied to a study on the influence of speech rate on aerodynamic properties.
The unfolding discussion will focus on the internal representation of turbulent sounds in the phonology of German as well as pinpoint the special status of the prime defining the quality of turbulence. It will also be argued that this prime is capable of entering into special types of licensing relations, which results in specific phonetic manifestations of forms. We shall compare the effects of two processes attested in German: consonant degemination and spirantisation with a view to revealing the role of the turbulence-defining element in the two operations. Furthermore, our attention will be focused on the workings of the Obligatory Contour Principle which, as will be shown below, exerts decisive impact on prime interplay and consequently the phonetic realization of sounds and words. We shall see that segmental identity is contingent on the languagespecific interpretation of inter-element bonds.
Aware of the importance of prime autonomy in determining the manifestation of sounds, let us start with a brief outline of the fundamental segment structure principles offered by the theory of Phonological Government.
One of the most important insights of Optimality Theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993) is that phonological processes can be reduced to the interaction between faithfulness and universal markedness principles. In the most constrained version of the theory, all phonological processes should be thus reducible. This hypothesis is tested by alternations that appear to be phonological but in which universal markedness principles appear to play no role. If we are to pursue the claim that all phonological processes depend on the interaction of faithfulness and markedness, then processes that are not dependent on markedness must lie outside phonology. In this paper I will examine a group of such processes, the initial consonant mutations of the Celtic languages, and argue that they belong entirely to the morphology of the languages, not the phonology.
This paper follows a new perspective on speech errors within the framework of Articulatory Phonology, as proposed by Goldstein et al. (in prep.). On the basis of kinematic evidence, their work has demonstrated that speech errors are not restricted to categorical exchanges of position of segmental units, but rather gestures that compose segments can exhibit errors that vary from zero to maximal in magnitude.
Here we report results from two perceptual experiments which use stimuli selected on the basis of their articulatory properties only, covering a range of errorful gestural activations. The outcome of the perceptual experiments suggests that different segments show different degrees of vulnerability to (subsegmental) speech errors: While listeners detected errors reliably for some segments, for other segments the reaction to errorful and non-errorful tokens was not distinct. The data suggest that at least for some error types an asymmetric error distribution arises due to perception, while production itself is not asymmetric. However, for error types involving segments whose gestural compositions stand in a subset relationship to each other (as described below), asymmetries may indeed originate in production due to the overall dominance of a gestural intrusion bias observed in the production data of Goldstein et al. (in prep.).
The papers in this volume were presented at the eleventh meeting of the Austronesian Formal Linguistics Association (AFLA 11), held from April 23-25 at the Zentrum für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin, Germany. The conference was organized by Hans-Martin Gärtner, Joachim Sabel, and myself, as part of the research project Clause Structure and Adjuncts in Austronesian Languages. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). We would like to thank Wayan Arka, Agibail Cohn, Laura Downing, Silke Hamann, S J Hannahs, Ray Harlow, Nikolaus Himmelmann, Yuchua E. Hsiao, Lillian Huang, Ed Keenan, Glyne Piggott, Charles Randriamasimanana, Joszef Szakos, Barbara Stiebels, Jane Tang, Lisa Travis, Noami Tsukido, Sam Wang, Elizabeth Zeitoun, Kie Ross Zuraw, and Marzena Zygis for reviewing the abstracts. We are thankful to Mechthild Bernhard, Jenny Ehrhardt, Fabienne Fritzsche, Theódóra Torfadóttir and Tue Trinh for their help during the conference. I would like to thank Theódóra for providing essential editorial assistance.
This article presents new experimental data on the phonetics of syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ in Southern British English and then proposes a new phonological account of their behaviour. Previous analyses (Chomsky and Halle 1968:354, Gimson 1989, Gussmann 1991 and Wells 1995) have proposed that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ should be analysed in a uniform manner. Data presented here, however, shows that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ behave in very different ways, and in light of this, a unitary analysis is not justified. Instead, a proposal is made that syllabic /l/ and syllabic /n/ have different phonological structures, and that these different phonological structures explain their different phonetic behaviours.
This article is organised as follows: First a general background is given to the phenomenon of syllabic consonants both cross linguistically and specifically in Southern British English. In §3 a set of experiments designed to elicit syllabic consonants are described and in §4 the results of these experiments are presented. §5 contains a discussion on data published by earlier authors concerning syllabic consonants in English. In §6 a theoretical phonological framework is set out, and in §7 the results of the experiments are analysed in the light of this framework. In the concluding section, some outstanding issues are addressed and several areas for further research are suggested.
In this paper the issue of the nature of the representations of the speech production task in the speaker's brain is addressed in a production-perception interaction framework. Since speech is produced to be perceived, it is hypothesized that its production is associated for the speaker with the generation of specific physical characteristics that are for the listeners the objects of speech perception. Hence, in the first part of the paper, four reference theories of speech perception are presented, in order to guide and to constrain the search for possible correlates of the speech production task in the physical space: the Acoustic Invariance Theory, the Adaptive Variability Theory, the Motor Theory and the Direct-Realist Theory. Possible interpretations of these theories in terms of representations of the speech production task are proposed and analyzed. In a second part, a few selected experimental studies are presented, which shed some light on this issue. In the conclusion, on the basis of the joint analysis of theoretical and experimental aspects presented in the paper, it is proposed that representations of the speech production task are multimodal, and that a hierarchy exists among the different modalities, the acoustic modality having the highest level of priority. It is also suggested that these representations are not associated with invariant characteristics, but with regions of the acoustic, orosensory and motor control spaces.
A fundamental question in the study of speech is about the invariance of the ultimate percepts, or features. The present paper gives an overview of the noninvariance problem and offers some hints towards a solution. Examination of various data on place and voicing perception suggests the following points. Features correspond to natural boundaries between sounds, which are included in the infant's predispositions for speech perception. Adult percepts arise from couplings and contextual interactions between features. Both couplings and interactions contribute to invariance. But this is at the expense of profound qualitative changes in perceptual boundaries implying that features are neither independently nor invariantly perceived. The question then is to understand the principles which guide feature couplings and interactions during perceptual development. The answer might reside in the fact that: (1) adult boundaries converge to a single point of the perceptual space, suggesting a context-free central reference; (2) this point corresponds to the neutral vocoïd, suggesting the reference is related to production; (3) at this point perceptual boundaries correspond to the natural ones, suggesting the reference is anchored in predispositions for feature perception. In sum, perceptual invariance seems to be grounded on a radial representation of the vocal tract around a singular point at which boundaries are context-fee, natural and coincide with the neutral vocoïd.
It has been hypothesized that sounds which are less perceptible are more likely to be altered than more salient sounds, the rationale being that the loss of information resulting from a change in a sound which is difficult to perceive is not as great as the loss resulting from a change in a more salient sound. Kohler (1990) suggested that the tendency to reduce articulatory movements is countered by perceptual and social constraints, finding that fricatives are relatively resistant to reduction in colloquial German. Kohler hypothesized that this is due to the perceptual salience of fricatives, a hypothesis which was supported by the results of a perception experiment by Hura, Lindblom, and Diehl (1992). These studies showed that the relative salience of speech sounds is relevant to explaining phonological behavior. An additional factor is the impact of different acoustic environments on the perceptibility of speech sounds. Steriade (1997) found that voicing contrasts are more common in positions where more cues to voicing are available. The P-map, proposed by Steriade (2001a, b), allows the representation of varying salience of segments in different contexts. Many researchers have posited a relationship between speech perception and phonology. The purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence for this relationship, drawing on the case of Turkish /h/ deletion.
This article deals with the Tashlhiyt dialect of Berber (henceforth TB) spoken in the southern part of Morocco. In TB, words may consist entirely of consonants without vowels and sometimes of only voiceless obstruents, e.g. tft#tstt "you rolled it (fem)". In this study we have carried out acoustic, video-endoscopic and phonological analyses to answer the following question: is schwa, which may function as syllabic, a segment at the level of phonetic representations in TB? Video-endoscopic films were made of one male native speaker of TB, producing a list of forms consisting entirely of voiceless obstruents. The same list was produced by 7 male native speakers of TB for the acoustic analysis. The phonological analysis is based on the behaviour of vowels with respect to the phonological rule of assibilation. This study shows the absence of schwa vowels in forms consisting of voiceless obstruents.
The current paper explores these two sorts of phonetic explanations of the relationship between syllabic position and the voicing contrast in American English. It has long been observed that the contrast between, for example, /p/ and /b/ is expressed differently, depending on the position of the stop with respect to the vowel. Preceding a vowel within a syllable, the contrast is largely one of aspiration. /p/ is aspirated, while /b/ is voiceless, or in some dialects voiced or even an implosive. Following a vowel within a syllable, both /p/ and /b/ both tend to lack voicing in the closure and the contrast is expressed largely by dynamic differences in the transition between the previous vowel and the stop. Here, vowel and closure duration are negatively correlated such that the /p/ has a shorter vowel and longer closure duration. This difference is often enhanced by the addition of glottalization to /p/. In addition to these differences, there are additional differences connected to higher-level organization involving stress and feet edges. To make the current discussion more tractable, we will restrict ourselves to the two conditions (CV and VC) laid out above.
In this study, cross-dialectal variation in the use of the acoustic cues of VOT and F0 to mark the laryngeal contrast in Korean stops is examined with Chonnam Korean and Seoul Korean. Prior experimental results (Han & Weitzman, 1970; Hardcastle, 1973; Jun, 1993 &1998; Kim, C., 1965) show that pitch values in the vowel onset following the target stop consonants play a supplementary role to VOT in designating the three contrastive laryngeal categories. F0 contours are determined in part by the intonational system of a language, which raises the question of how the intonational system interacts with phonological contrasts. Intonational difference might be linked to dissimilar patterns in using the complementary acoustic cues of VOT and F0. This hypothesis is tested with 6 Korean speakers, three Seoul Korean and three Chonnam Korean speakers. The results show that Chonnam Korean involves more 3-way VOT and a 2-way distinction in F0 distribution in comparison to Seoul Korean that shows more 3-way F0 distribution and a 2-way VOT distinction. The two acoustic cues are complementary in that one cue is rather faithful in marking 3-way contrast, while the other cue marks the contrast less distinctively. It also seems that these variations are not completely arbitrary, but linked to the phonological characteristics in dialects. Chonnam Korean, in which the initial tonal realization in the accentual phrase is expected to be more salient, tends to minimize the F0 perturbation effect from the preceding consonants by taking more overlaps in F0 distribution. And a 3-way distribution of VOT in Chonnam Korean, as compensation, can be also understood as a durational sensitivity. Without these characteristics, Seoul Korean shows relatively more overlapping distribution in VOT and more 3-way separation in F0 distribution.
This paper presents the results of Open Quotient measurements in EGG signals of young (18 to 30 year old) and elderly (59 to 82 year old) male and female speakers. The paper further presents quantitative results on the relation between the OQ and the perception of a speaker's age. Higgins & Saxman (1991) found a decreased OQEGG with increasing age for females, whereas the OQEGG in sustained vowel material increased for males as the speakers age increased. In Linville (2002), however, the spectral amplitudes in the region of F0 (obtained by LTAS-measurements of read speech material) increased with increasing age independent of gender; this could be interpreted indirectly as an increasing OQ. We measured the OQEGG not only for sustained vowels, but also in vowels taken from isolated words. In order to analyse the relation between breathiness in terms of an increased OQ and the mean perceived age per stimulus a perception test was carried out in which listeners were asked to estimate speaker's age based on sustained /a/-vowel stimuli varying in vocal effort (soft - normal - loud) during production. The results indicated the following: (i) The decreased OQ for elderly females originally found by Higgins & Saxman is not apparent in our data for sustained /a/-vowels. For our female speakers no significant difference between the OQ of young and old speakers was found; for elderly males, however, we also found an increasing OQ with increasing age.(ii) In addition, a statistically significant increased OQEGG occurs for the group of the elderly males for the vowels from the word material. (iii) Our results show a strong positive relation between perceived age and OQ in male voices. Regarding (i) and (ii), at least the male speaker's voice becomes more breathy as age increases. Considering (iii), increased breathiness may contribute to the listener’s perception of increased age.
Table of Contents:
T. A. Hall (Indiana University): English syllabification as the interaction of markedness constraints
Antony D. Green: Opacity in Tiberian Hebrew: Morphology, not phonology
Sabine Zerbian (ZAS Berlin): Phonological Phrases in Xhosa (Southern Bantu)
Laura J. Downing (ZAS Berlin): What African Languages Tell Us About Accent Typology
Marzena Zygis (ZAS Berlin): (Un)markedness of trills: the case of Slavic r-palatalisation
Laura J. Downing (ZAS Berlin), Al Mtenje (University of Malawi), Bernd Pompino-Marschall (Humboldt-Universitat Berlin): Prosody and Information Structure in Chichewa
T. A. Hall (Indiana University). Silke Hamann (ZAS Berlin), Marzena Zygis (ZAS Berlin): The phonetics of stop assibilation
Christian Geng (ZAS Berlin), Christine Mooshammer (Universitat Kiel): The Hungarian palatal stop: phonological considerations and phonetic data
In the research field initiated by Lindblom & Liljencrants in 1972, we illustrate the possibility of giving substance to phonology, predicting the structure of phonological systems with nonphonological principles, be they listener-oriented (perceptual contrast and stability) or speaker-oriented (articulatory contrast and economy). We proposed for vowel systems the Dispersion-Focalisation Theory (Schwartz et al., 1997b). With the DFT, we can predict vowel systems using two competing perceptual constraints weighted with two parameters, respectively λ and α. The first one aims at increasing auditory distances between vowel spectra (dispersion), the second one aims at increasing the perceptual salience of each spectrum through formant proximities (focalisation). We also introduced new variants based on research in physics - namely, phase space (λ,α) and polymorphism of a given phase, or superstructures in phonological organisations (Vallée et al., 1999) which allow us to generate 85.6% of 342 UPSID systems from 3- to 7-vowel qualities. No similar theory for consonants seems to exist yet. Therefore we present in detail a typology of consonants, and then suggest ways to explain plosive vs. fricative and voiceless vs. voiced consonants predominances by i) comparing them with language acquisition data at the babbling stage and looking at the capacity to acquire relatively different linguistic systems in relation with the main degrees of freedom of the articulators; ii) showing that the places “preferred” for each manner are at least partly conditioned by the morphological constraints that facilitate or complicate, make possible or impossible the needed articulatory gestures, e.g. the complexity of the articulatory control for voicing and the aerodynamics of fricatives. A rather strict coordination between the glottis and the oral constriction is needed to produce acceptable voiced fricatives (Mawass et al., 2000). We determine that the region where the combinations of Ag (glottal area) and Ac (constriction area) values results in a balance between the voice and noise components is indeed very narrow. We thus demonstrate that some of the main tendencies in the phonological vowel and consonant structures of the world’s languages can be explained partly by sensorimotor constraints, and argue that actually phonology can take part in a theory of Perception-for-Action-Control.
Arguing against Bhat’s (1974) claim that retroflexion cannot be correlated with retraction, the present article illustrates that retroflexes are always retracted, though retraction is not claimed to be a sufficient criterion for retroflexion. The cooccurrence of retraction with retroflexion is shown to make two further implications; first, that non-velarized retroflexes do not exist, and second, that secondary palatalization of retroflexes is phonetically impossible. The process of palatalization is shown to trigger a change in the primary place of articulation to non-retroflex. Phonologically, retraction has to be represented by the feature specification [+back] for all retroflex segments.
Consonants exhibit more variation in their phonetic realization than is typically acknowledged, but that variation is linguistically constrained. Acoustic analysis of both read and spontaneous speech reveals that consonants are not necessarily realized with the manner of articulation they would have in careful citation form. Although the variation is wider than one would imagine, it is limited by the phoneme inventory. The phoneme inventory of the language restricts the range of variation to protect the system of phonemic contrast. That is, consonants may stray phonetically into unfilled areas of the language's sound space. Listeners are seldom consciously aware of the consonant variation, and perceive the consonants phonemically as in their citation forms. A better understanding of surface phonetic consonant variation can help make predictions in theoretical domains and advances in applied domains.
Data on lingual movement, dorsopalatal contact and F2 frequency presented in previous papers of ours (Recasens, 2002; Recasens and Pallarès, 2001; Recasens, Pallarès and Fontdevila, 1997) suggest that the degree of articulatory constraint (DAC) model accounts to a large extent for the extent and direction of tongue dorsum coarticulation in VCV and CC sequences. A goal of this investigation is to verify the predictions of this model with respect to jaw V-to-V effects in VCV sequences using articulatory movement data collected with electromagnetic articulometry (EMA).
In this paper, I discuss four different verb forms in Ndebele (a Nguni Bantu language spoken mainly in Zimbabwe) - the imperative, reduplicated, future and participial. I show that while all four are subject to minimality restrictions, minimality is satisfied differently in each of these morphological contexts. To account for this, I argue that in Ndebele (as in other Bantu languages) Word and RED are not the only constituents which must satisfy minimality: the Stem is also subject to minimality conditions in some morphological contexts. This paper, then, provides additional arguments for the proposal that Phonological Word is not the only sub-lexical morpho-prosodic constituent. Further, I argue that, although Word, RED and Stern are all subject to the same minimality constraint – they must all be minimally bisyllabic - this does not follow from a single 'generalized' constraint. Instead, I argue, contra recent work within Generalized Template Theory (see, e.g., McCarthy & Prince 1994, 1995a, 1999; Urbanezyk 1995, 1996; and Walker 2000; etc.) that a distinct minimality constraint must be formalized for each of these morpho-prosodic constituents.
Much work on the interaction of prosody and focus assumes that, crosslinguistically, there is a necessary correlation between the position of main sentence stress (or accent) and focus, and that an intonational pitch change on the focused element is a primary correlate of focus. In this paper, I discuss primary data from three Bantu languages – Chichewa, Durban Zulu and Chitumbuka – and show that in all three languages phonological re-phrasing, not stress, is the main prosodic correlate of focus and that lengthening, not pitch movement, is the main prosodic correlate of phrasing. This result is of interest for the typology of intonation in illustrating languages where intonation has limited use and where, notably, intonation does not highlight focused information in the way we might expect from European stress languages.
In this paper it is argued that several typologically unrelated languages share the tendency to avoid voiced sibilant affricates. This tendency is explained by appealing to the phonetic properties of the sounds, and in particular to their aerodynamic characteristics. On the basis of experimental evidence it is shown that conflicting air pressure requirements for maintaining voicing and frication are responsible for the avoidance of voiced affricates. In particular, the air pressure released from the stop phase of the affricate is too high to maintain voicing which in consequence leads to a devoicing of the frication part.
This study is an electropalatographic investigation of clusters composed of /n/ or /l/ followed by the (alveolo)palatal consonants /ʎ, ɲ/ or by dental /t/ in three Catalan dialects, i.e., Majorcan, Valencian and Eastern. Data show that articulatory blending through superposition occurs in the palatalizing environment except when C1 is highly constrained (e.g., dark /l/) or C2 is purely palatal and therefore, produced at a distant articulatory location from C1. Contrary to previous descriptions in the literature, data for /nt, lt/ reveal that blending through superposition rather than assimilation is at work. The implications of these data for theories of speech production are discussed.
This study examines intraoral pressure for English and German stops in bilabial and alveolar place of articulation. Our subjects are two speakers of American English and three speakers of German. VOICING is the main phonological contrast under evaluation in both word initial and word final position. For initial stops, a few of the pressure characteristics showed differences between English and German, but on the whole the results point to similar production strategies at both places of articulation in the two different languages. Analysis of the pressure trajectory differences between VOICING categories in initial position raises questions about articulatory differences. In the initial closing gesture, time from start of gesture to closure is roughly equivalent for both categories, but the pressure change is significantly smaller on average for VOICED stops. Final stops, however, present a more complicated picture. German final stops are neutralized to a presumed VOICELESS phonological state. English final /p/ is broadly similar to German /p/, but English /t/ often shows no pressure increase at all which is at odds with the conventional account of phonation termination via pressure increase and loss of pressure differential. The results raise the question of whether the German final stops should be considered VOICELESS or some intermediate form, at least as compared to English final stops.
Studying kinematic behavior in speech production is an indispensable and fruitful methodology in order to describe for instance phonemic contrasts, allophonic variations, prosodic effects in articulatory movements. More intriguingly, it is also interpreted with respect to its underlying control mechanisms. Several interpretations have been borrowed from motor control studies of arm, eye, and limb movements. They do either explain kinematics with respect to a fine tuned control by the Central Nervous System (CNS) or they take into account a combination of influences arising from motor control strategies at the CNS level and from the complex physical properties of the peripheral speech apparatus. We assume that the latter is more realistic and ecological. The aims of this article are: first, to show, via a literature review related to the so called '1/3 power law' in human arm motor control, that this debate is of first importance in human motor control research in general. Second, to study a number of speech specific examples offering a fruitful framework to address this issue. However, it is also suggested that speech motor control differs from general motor control principles in the sense that it uses specific physical properties such as vocal tract limitations, aerodynamics and biomechanics in order to produce the relevant sounds. Third, experimental and modelling results are described supporting the idea that the three properties are crucial in shaping speech kinematics for selected speech phenomena. Hence, caution should be taken when interpreting kinematic results based on experimental data alone.
Glottal marking of vowel-initial German words by glottalization and glottal stop insertion were investigated in dependence on speech rate, word type (content vs. function words), word accent, phrasal position and the following vowel. The analysed material consisted of speeches of Konrad Adenauer, Thomas Mann and Richard von Weizsäcker. The investigation shows that not only the left boundary of accented syllables (including phrasal stress boundary) and lexical words favour glottal stops/glottalization, but also that the segmental level appears to have a strong impact on these insertion processes. Specifically, the results show that low vowels in contrast to non-low ones favour glottal stops/glottalization even before non-accented syllables and functional words.
The present article illustrates that the specific articulatory and aerodynamic requirements for voiced but not voiceless alveolar or dental stops can cause tongue tip retraction and tongue mid lowering and thus retroflexion of front coronals. This retroflexion is shown to have occurred diachronically in the three typologically unrelated languages Dhao (Malayo-Polynesian), Thulung (Sino-Tibetan), and Afar (East-Cushitic). In addition to the diachronic cases, we provide synchronic data for retroflexion from an articulatory study with four speakers of German, a language usually described as having alveolar stops. With these combined data we supply evidence that voiced retroflex stops (as the only retroflex segments in a language) did not necessarily emerge from implosives, as argued by Haudricourt (1950), Greenberg (1970), Bhat (1973), and Ohala (1983). Instead, we propose that the voiced front coronal plosive /d/ is generally articulated in a way that favours retroflexion, that is, with a smaller and more retracted place of articulation and a lower tongue and jaw position than /t/.
Introduction
(2006)
The papers in this volume reflect a number of broad themes which have emerged during the meetings of the project as particularly relevant for current Bantu linguistics. [...] The papers show that approaches to Bantu linguistics have also developed in new directions since this foundational work. For example, interaction of phonological phrasing with syntax and word order on the one hand, and with information structure on the other, is more prominent in the papers here than in earlier literature. Quite generally, the role of information structure for the understanding of Bantu syntax has become more important, in particular with respect to the expression of topic and focus, but also for the analysis of more central syntactic concerns such as questions and relative clauses. This, of course, relates to a wider development in linguistic theory to incorporate notions of topic and focus into core syntactic analysis, and it is not surprising that work on Bantu languages and on linguistic theory are closely related to each other in this respect. Another noteworthy development is the increasing interest in variation among Bantu languages which reflects the fact that more empirical evidence from more Bantu languages has become available over the last decade or so. The picture that emerges from this research is that morpho-syntactic variation in Bantu is rich and complex, and that there is strong potential to link this research to research on micro-variation in European (and other) languages, and to the study of morpho-syntactic variables, or parameters, more generally.
In this paper we focus on the similarities tying together the second segment of an onset cluster and a singleton coda segment. We offer a proposal based on Baertsch (2002) accounting for this similarity and show how it captures a number of observations which have defied previous explanation. In accounting for the similarity of patterning between the second member of an onset and a coda consonant, we propose to augment Prince & Smolensky's (P&S, 1993/2002) Margin Hierarchy so as to distinguish between structural positions that prefer low sonority and those that prefer high sonority. P&S's Margin Hierarchy, which gives preference to segments of low sonority, applies to singleton onsets; this is our M1 hierarchy. Our proposed M2 hierarchy applies both to the second member of an onset and to a singleton coda. The M2 hierarchy differs from the M1 hierarchy in giving preference to consonants of high sonority. Splitting the Margin Hierarchy into the M1 and M2 hierarchies allows us to explain typological, phonotactic, and acquisitional observations that have defied previous explanation. In Section 2 of this paper, we briefly provide background on the links that tie together the second member of an onset and a singleton coda. In Section 3, we review P&S's Margin Hierarchy, showing that it becomes problematic when extended to coda consonants. We then offer our proposal for a split margin hierarchy. Section 4 extends the split margin approach to complex onsets. We then show how it is able to account for various typological, phonotactic, and acquisitional observations. In Section 5, we will conclude the paper by briefly sketching how the split margin approach enables us to analyze syllable contact phenomena without requiring a specific syllable contact constraint (or additional hierarchy) or reference to an external sonority scale.
The present paper offers a summary of the results of two earlier experiments (Nawrocki and Gonet 2004; Nawrocki 2004), in which acoustic properties of the voiceless velar fricative phoneme /x/ in Southern Polish were investigated.
As is found in both studies (Nawrocki and Gonet 2004; Nawrocki 2004), speakers of both genders favour glottal articulation, with partial or full voicing. Word final contexts are decisively in favour of [x]. The word initial, prevocalic positions seem to allow quite a number of allophonic variants of /x/ . These are: [x], [ɦ], [ç] and, additionally, the voiceless glottal, the pharyngeal or the epiglottal [h]/[ħ]/[ʜ]. Another factor taken into account is the coarticulation effect of the vocalic context on the choice of articulation. Based on the results of the experiments, a reformulated allophonic composition is proposed for Polish /x/. It makes room for previously unconsidered pharyngeal and glottal allophones.
In order to inspect the acoustic properties of the allophones of Polish /x/ further, their static and dynamic spectral features are compared to those of phonetically similar sounds in other languages where they have the status of independent phonemes. Special attention is paid to the distribution of spectral peaks and their intensity. The fact that in Polish there are no 'back' fricative phonemes that would contrast with /x/ creates a wide range of acceptable allophonic articulations that cannot be challenged from either articulatory or perceptual points of view.
In this paper, we investigate two pairs of structures in German and English: German Weak Pronoun Left Dislocation and English Topicalization, on the one hand, and German and English Hanging Topic Left Dislocation, on the other. We review the prosodic, lexical, syntactic, and discourse evidence that places the former two structures into one class and the latter two into another, taking this evidence to show that dislocates in the former class are syntactically integrated into their 'host' sentences while those in the latter class are not. From there, we show that the most straightforward way to account for this difference in 'integration' is to take the dislocates in the latter structures to be 'orphans', phrases that are syntactically independent of the phrases with which they are associated, providing additional empirical and theoretical support for this analysis — which, we point out, has a number of antecedents in the literature.
The phenomenon of phonological opacity has been the subject of much debate in recent years, with scholars opposed to the Optimality Theory (OT) research program arguing that opacity proves OT must be false, while the solutions proposed within OT, such as sympathy theory and stratal OT , have proved to be unsatisfying to many OT proponents, who have found these proposals to be inconsistent with the parallelist approach to phonological processes otherwise characteristic of OT. In this paper I reexamine one of the best known cases of opacity, that found in three processes of Tiberian Hebrew (TH), and argue that these processes only appear to be opaque, because previous analyses have treated them as pure phonology, rather than as an interaction between phonology and morphology. Once it is recognized that certain words of TH are lexically marked to end with a syllabic trochee, and that the goal of paradigm uniformity exerts grammatical pressure on phonology, the three processes no longer present a problem to parallelist OT. The results suggest the possibility that all crosslinguistic instances of apparent opacity can be explained in terms of the phonology-morphology interface and that purely phonological opacity does not exist. If this claim is true, then parallelist OT can be defended against its detractors without the need for additional mechanisms like sympathy theory and stratal OT.
This study examines the movement trajectories of the dorsal tongue movements during symmetrical /VCa/ -sequences, where /V/ was one of the Hungarian long or short vowels /i,a,u/ and C either the voiceless palatal or velar stop consonants. General aims of this study were to deliver a data-driven account for (a) the evidence of the division between dorsality and coronality and (b) for the potential role coarticulatory factors could play for the relative frequency of velar palatalization processes in genetically unrelated languages. Results suggest a clear-cut demarcation between the behaviour of purely dorsal velars and the coronal palatals. Moreover, factors arising from a general movement economy might contribute to the palatalization processes mentioned.
The present study offers an Optimality-Theoretic analysis of the syllabification of intervocalic consonants and glides in Modern English. It will be argued that the proposed syllabifications fall out from universal markedness constraints – all of which derive motivation from other languages – and a language-specific ranking. The analysis offered below is therefore an alternative to the traditional rule-based analyses of English syllabification, e.g. Kahn (1976), Borowsky (1986), Giegerich (1992, 1999) and to the Optimality-Theoretic treatment proposed by Hammond (1999), whose analysis requires several language-specific constraints which apparently have no cross-linguistic motivation.
This paper investigates how syntax and focus interact in deriving the phonological phrasing of utterances in Xhosa, a Bantu language spoken in South Africa. Although the influence of syntax on phrasing is uncontroversial, a purely syntactic analysis cannot account for all the data reported for Xhosa by Jokweni (1995). Focus influences the phrasing in that it inserts a phonological phrase-boundary after the focused constituent. This generalization can account for the variation found in the phrasing of adverbials.
The findings are dealt with in an OT-based framework following Truckenbrodt's work on Chichewa (1995, 1999) which is extended to the phrasing of adjuncts.
In this paper, I argue that this apparent problem is accounted for by the interaction of constraints. For the fixed segment [ɛ] in Cɛ-reduplication, I argue that [ɛ] is the second least marked vowel in Palauan, which appears when the default vowel [ǝ] cannot appear. I show that the Palauan facts are not only consistent with the proposals of Urbanczyk (1999) and Alderete et. al (1999), but they actually provide support of their claims. In the following section, I discuss Urbanczyk's (1999) arguments concerning ROOT faithfulness in reduplication and possible asymmetries between affix reduplicants and root reduplicants. In Section 3, I introduce Palauan reduplication and discuss Finer's (1986) observations on the resulting state verb (RSV) form. I show that the RSV forms support the classification that Cɛ-reduplicants are affixes, and CVCV -reduplicants are roots. In Section 4, I discuss the shape and vowel quality of the two reduplicants. The CVCV-reduplicant has three variants: CǝCǝ, CǝC and CV. I explain this variation, illustrating why [ǝ] appears in the first two variations. Then, I discuss the shape and vowel quality of the Cɛ-reduplicant, arguing that the fixed segment [ɛ] in Cɛ-reduplication is a special case of TETU. I show that root faithfulness constraints are crucial in determining the shape and vowel quality of the reduplicants. Section 5 is the conclusion.
Ida'an-Begak is a Western Malayo-Polynesian language spoken by approximately 6,000 people on the east coast of Sabah, Malaysia, Borneo and belongs to the Sabahan subgroup of the North Borneo subgroup (Blust 1998). Ida'an-Begak has three dialects, Ida'an, spoken in the villages of Segama to the west of Lahad Datu, Ida'an Sungai spoken in the Kinabatangan and Sandakan districts, and Begak spoken in Ulu Tungku, to the east of Lahad Datu (Banker 1984).1 Moody (1993) deals with Ida'an; this paper concentrates on the Begak dialect. In this paper I will present new data gathered in the field and provide an analysis of the allomorphy. The study is based on spontaneous data as well as examples elicited from my language informants.
The goal of this paper is to survey the accent systems of the indigenous languages of Africa. Although roughly one third of the world’s languages are spoken in Africa, this continent has tended to be underrepresented in earlier stress and accent typology surveys, like Hyman (1977). This one aims to fill that gap. Two main contributions to the typology of accent are made by this study of African languages. First, it confirms Hyman's (1977) earlier finding that (stem-)initial and penult are the most common positions, cross-linguistically, to be assigned main stress. Further, it shows that not only stress but also tone and segment distribution can define prominence asymmetries which are best analyzed in terms of accent.
This paper evaluates trills [r] and their palatalized counterparts [rj] from the point of view of markedness. It is argued that [r]s are unmarked sounds in comparison to [r ]s which follows from the examination of the following parameters: (a) frequency of occurrence, (b) articulatory and aerodynamic characteristics, (c) perceptual features, (d) emergence in the process of language acquisition, (e) stability from a diachronic point of view, (f) phonotactic distribution, and (g) implications.
Several markedness aspects of [r]s and [rj] are analyzed on the basis of Slavic languages which offer excellent material for the evaluation of trills. Their phonetic characteristics incorporated into phonetically grounded constraints are employed for a phonological OT-analysis of r-palatalization in two selected languages: Polish and Czech.
This article examines the motivation for phonological stop assibilations, e.g. /t/ is realized as [ts], [s] or [tʃ] before /i/, from the phonetic perspective. Hall & Hamann (2003) posit the following two implications: (a) Assibilation cannot be triggered by /i/ unless it is also triggered by /j/, and (b) Voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. In the following study we present the results of three acoustic experiments with native speakers of German and Polish which support implications (a) and (b). In our experiments we measured the friction phase after the /t d/ release before the onset of the following high front vocoid for four speakers of German and Polish. We found that the friction phase for /tj/ was significantly longer than that of /ti/, and that the friction phase of /t/ in the assibilation context is significantly longer than that of /d/.
Vowel dispersion in Truku
(2004)
This study investigates the dispersion of vowel space in Truku, an endangered Austronesian language in Taiwan. Adaptive Dispersion (Liljencrants and Lindblom, 1972; Lindblom, 1986, 1990) proposes that the distinctive sounds of a language tend to be positioned in phonetic space in a way that maximizes perceptual contrast. For example, languages with large vowel inventories tend to expand the overall acoustic vowel space. Adaptive Dispersion predicts that the distance between the point vowels will increase with the size of a language's vowel inventory. Thus, the available acoustic vowel space is utilized in a way that maintains maximal auditory contrast.
This paper presents preliminary results of a phonetic and phonological study of the Ntcheu dialect of Chichewa spoken by Al Mtenje (one of the co-authors). This study confirms Kanerva's (1990) work on Nkhotakota Chichewa showing that phonological re-phrasing is the primary cue to information structure in this language. It expands on Kanerva's work in several ways. First, we show that focus phrasing has intonational correlates, namely, the manipulation of downdrift and pause. Further, we show that there is a correlation between pitch prominence and discourse prominence at the left and right periphery which conditions dislocation to these positions. Finally, we show that focus and syntax are not the only factors which condition phonological phrasing in Chichewa.
The current study focuses on the prosodic realization of negators in Saisiyat, an endangered aboriginal language of Taiwan, and compares its prosodic realization of negation with that of English. The results of this study indicate that sentential subjects are the most acoustically prominent items in the Saisiyat negative sentences measured. This contrasts sharply with the English experimental sentences, in which the negator itself was the most acoustically prominent item. These findings suggest that Saisiyat is a pitch-accent language; thus, the presence of negators does not significantly change the prosodic parameters of surrounding words. English, in contrast, is an intonation language, so the presence of negation results in substantial prosodic modification. This suggests that the phenomenon of negation is universally prominent; however, languages with different prosodic systems will adopt different strategies for realizing prominence.
This study focuses upon a detailed description and analysis of the phonetic structures of Paiwan, an aboriginal language spoken in Taiwan, with around 53,000 speakers, Paiwan, a member of the Austronesian language family, is not typologically related to the other languages such as Mandarin and Taiwanese spoken in its geographically contiguous districts, Earlier work on phonological features of Paiwan (Chang, 1999; Tseng, 2003) sought an account in terms of segments and isolated facts about reduplication and stress, without accounting for the possible roles of phrase-level and sentence-Ievel prosodic structures, Government Teaching Material (1993) listed 25 consonants and 4 vowels, without any description of phonetic features and phonological rules, Chang's (2000) reference grammar included 22 consonants and 4 vowels, with a very brief description of 5 phonological rules on single words, Regional diversity and 25 consonants have been mentioned in Pulaluyan's (2002) teaching material; however, no description of phonological rules was found in his material.
Syllable cut is said to be a phonologically distinctive feature in some languages where the difference in vowel quantity is accompanied by a difference in vowel quality like in German. There have been several attempts to find the corresponding phonetic correlates for syllable cut, from which the energy measurements of vowels by Spiekermann (2000) proved appropriate for explaining the difference between long, i.e. smoothly, and short, i.e. abruptly cut, vowels: in smoothly cut vowels, a larger number of peaks was counted in the energy contour which were located further back than in abruptly cut segments, and the overall energy was more constant throughout the entire nucleus. On this basis, we intended to compare German as a syllable cut language and Hungarian where the feature was not expected to be relevant. However, the phonetic correlates of syllable cut found in this study do not entirely confirm Spiekermann's results. It seems that the energy features of vowels are more strongly connected to their duration than to their quality.
This study reports on the results of an airflow experiment that measured the duration of airflow and the amount of air from release of a stop to the beginning of a following vowel in stop vowel-sequences of German. The sequences involved coronal, labial and velar voiced and voiceless stops followed by the vocoids /j, i:, ı, ɛ, ʊ, a/. The experiment tested the influence of the three factors voicing of stop, place of stop articulation, and the following vocoid context on the duration and amount of air as possible explanation for assibilation processes. The results show that the voiceless stops are related to a longer duration and more air in the release phase than voiced ones. For the influence of the vocoids, a significant difference could be established between /j/ and all other vocoids for the duration of the release phase. This difference could not be found for the amount of air over this duration. The place of articulation had only restricted influence. Velars resulted in significantly longer duration of the release phase compared to non-velars. A significant difference in amount of air between the places of articulation could not be found.
The present article is a follow-up study of the investigation of labiodentals in German and Dutch by Hamann & Sennema (2005), where we looked at the perception of the Dutch labiodental three-way contrast by German listeners without any knowledge of Dutch and German learners of Dutch. The results of this previous study suggested that the German voiced labiodental fricative /v/ is perceptually closer to the Dutch approximant /ʋ/ than to the corresponding Dutch voiced labiodental fricative /v/. These perceptual indications are attested by the acoustic findings in the present study. German /v/ has a similar harmonicity median and a similar centre of gravity to Dutch /ʋ/, but differs from Dutch /v/ in these parameters. With respect to the acoustic parameter of duration, German /v/ lies closer to the Dutch /v/ than to the Dutch /ʋ/.
'Correction' is the name of a sentence with contrastive focus' the phonological/phonetic realization of which is a single contrastive pitch accent. These sentences predominantly appear in (fictional) dialogues. The first speaker uses grammatical entities against which the next speaker protests with a sentence nearly identical except that it contains a prosodically marked corrective element. This paper makes contrastive focus visible by means of 'KF' (contrastive focus).
The present study, based on a typological survey of ca. 70 languages, offers a systematization of consonantal insertions by classifying them into three main types: grammatical, phonetic, and prosodic insertions. The three epenthesis types essentially differ from each other in terms of preferred sounds, domains of application, the role of segmental context, their occurrence cross-linguistically, the extent of variation and phonetic explication.
The present investigation is significantly different from other analyses of consonantal epentheses in the sense that it neither invokes markedness nor diachronic state of the processes under discussion. Instead, it considers the different nature of the epenthetic segments by referring to the representational levels and/or domains which are relevant for their appearance.
(Non)retroflexivity of slavic affricates and its motivation : Evidence from polish and czech <č>
(2005)
The goal of this paper is two-fold. First, it revises the common assumption that the affricate <č> denotes /t͡ʃ/ for all Slavic languages. On the basis of experimental results it is shown that Slavic <č> stands for two sounds: /t͡ʃ/ as e.g. in Czech and /ʈʂ/ as in Polish.
The second goal of the paper is to show that this difference is not accidental but it is motivated by perceptual relations among sibilants. In Polish, /t͡ʃ/ changed to /ʈʂ/ thus lowering its sibilant tonality and creating a better perceptual distance to /tɕ/, whereas in Czech /t͡ʃ/ did not turn to /ʈʂ/, as the former displayed sufficient perceptual distance to the only affricate present in the inventory, namely, the alveolar /t͡s/. Finally, an analysis of Czech and Polish affricate inventories is offered.
The distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English as evidence for the phonological word
(2000)
In the present article I discuss the distribution of trimoraic syllables in German and English. The reason I have chosen to analyze these two languages together is that the data in both languages are strikingly similar. However, although the basic generalization in (1) holds for both German and English, we will see below that trimoraic syllabIes do not have an identical distribution in both languages.
In the present study I make the following theoretical claims. First, I argue that the three environments in (1) have a property in common: they all describe the right edge of a phonological word (or prosodic word; henceforth pword). From a formal point of view, I argue that a constraint I dub the THIRD MORA RESTRICTION (henceforth TMR), which ensures that trimoraic syllables surface at the end of a pword, is active in German and English. According to my proposal trimoraic syllables cannot occur morpheme-internally because monomorphemic grammatical words like garden are parsed as single pwords. Second, I argue that the TMR refers crucially to moraic structure. In particular, underlined strings like the ones in (1) will be shown to be trimoraic; neither skeletal positions nor the subsyllabic constituent rhyme are necessary. Third, the TMR will be shown to be violated in certain (predictable) pword-internal cases, as in Monde and chamber; I account for such facts in an OptimalityTheoretic analysis (henceforth OT; Prince & Smolensky 1993) by ranking various markedness constraints among themselves or by ranking them ahead of the TMR. Fourth, I hold that the TMR describes a concrete level of grammar, which I refer to below as the 'surface' representation. In this respect, my treatment differs significantly from the one proposed for English by Borowsky (1986, 1989), in which the English facts are captured in a Lexical Phonology model by ordering the relevant constraint at level 1 in the lexicon.
Identity effects in phonology are deviations from regular phonological form (i.e. canonical patterns) which are due to the relatedness between words. More specifically, identity effects are those deviations which have the function to enhance similarity in the surface phonological form of morphologically related words. In rule-based generative phonology the effects in question are described by means of the cycle. For example, the stress on the second syllable in cond[ɛ]nsation as opposed to the stresslessness of the second syllable in comp[ǝ]nsation is described by applying the stress rules initially to the sterns thereby yielding condénse and cómpensàte. Subsequently the stress rules are reapplied to the affixed words with the initial stress assignment (i.e. stress on the second syllable in condense, but not in compensate) leaving its mark in the output form (cf. Chomsky and Halle 1968). A second example are words like lie[p]los 'unloving' in German, which shows the effects of neutralization in coda position (i.e. only voiceless obstruents may occur in coda position) even though the obstruent should 'regularly' be syllabified in head position (i.e. bl is a wellformed syllable head in German). Here the stern is syllabified on an initial cycle, obstruent devoicing applies (i.e. lie[p]) and this structure is left intact when affixation applies (i.e. lie[p ]Ios ) (cf. Hall 1992). As a result the stern of lie[p]los is identical to the base lie[p].
I argue in this study that consonantal strength shifts can be explained through positional bans on features, expressed over positions marked as weak at a given level of prosodic structure, usually the metrical foo!. This approach might be characterized as "templatic" in the sense it seeks to explain positional restrictions and distributional patterns relative to independently motivated, fixed prosodic elements. In this sense, it follows Dresher & Lahiri's (1991) idea of metrical coherence in phonological systems, namely, "[T]hat grammars adhere to syllabic templates and metrical patterns of limited types, and that these patterns persist across derivations and are available to a number of different processes ... " (251). [...] The study is structured as follows: section 1 presents a typology of distributional asymmetries based on data from unrelated languages, demonstrating that the stress foot of each of these languages determines the contexts of neutralization and weakening of stops. Section 2 elaborates the notion of a template, exploring some of its formal properties, while section 3 presents templatic analyses of data from English and German. Section 4 explores the properties of weak positions, especially weak onsets, in more detail, including discussion of templates in phonological acquisition. Section 5 summarizes and concludes the study.
The aim of this paper is to show what role prosodic constituents, especially the foot and the prosodic word play in Polish phonology. The focus is placed on their function in the representation of extrasyllabic consonants in word-initial, word-medial, and word-final positions.
The paper is organized as follows. In the first section, I show that the foot and the prosodic word are well-motivated prosodic constituents in Polish prosody. In the second part, I discuss consonant clusters in Polish focussing on segments that are not parsed into a syllable due to violations of the Sonority Sequencing Generalisation, i.e. extrasyllabic segments. Finally, I analyze possible representations of the extrasyllabic consonants and conclude that both the foot and the prosodic word play a crucial role in terms of licensing. My proposal differs from the ones by Rubach and Booij (1990b) and Rubach (1997) in that I argue that the word-initial sonorants traditionally called extrasyllabic are licenced by the foot and not by the prosodic word (cf. Rubach and Booij (1990b)) or the syllable (cf. Rubach (1997)). For my analysis I adopt the framework of Optimality Theory, cf. McCarthy and Prince (1993), Prince and Smolensky (1993), in which derivational levels are abandoned and only surface representations are evaluated by means of universal constraints.
In this work, I examine a set of languages which appear to require resyllabification postlexically; in less derivational terms, a word's syllabification in isolation differs from its syllabification in a phrase-internal context. Although many people, myself included, have been looking at such cases in isolation over the years, I bring together several examples here to see what features they share and how an Optimality Theory analysis improves upon rule-based derivational approaches.
The purpose of this paper is to provide a unified (i.e. independent of lexical categories) account of Persian stress. I show that by differentiating word- and phrase-level stress rules, one can account for the superficial differences exemplified in (1) above and many of the stipulations suggested by previous scholars. The paper is organized as follows. In section 1, I look at nouns and adjectives and propose a rule that would account for their stress pattern. In section 2, I extend the stress rule to verbs and show the problem this category poses to our generalization. The main proposal of this paper is discussed in section 3. I introduce the phrasal stress rule in Persian and show that by differentiating word-level and phrase-level stress rules, one can come to a unified account of Persian stress. Section 4 deals with some problematic eases for the proposed generalization and discusses some tentative solutions and their theoretical consequences. Section 5 concludes the paper.
While the perilinguistic child is endowed with predispositions for the categorical perception of phonetic features, their adaptation to the native language results from a long evolution from the end of the first year of age up to the adolescence. This evolution entails both a better discrimination between phonological categories, a concomitant reduction of the discrimination between within-category variants, and a higher precision of perceptual boundaries between categories. The first objective of the present study was to assess the relative importance of these modifications by comparing the perceptual performances of a group of 11 children, aged from 8 to 11 years, with those of their mothers. Our second objective was to explore the functional implications of categorical perception by comparing the performances of a group of 8 deaf children, equipped with a cochlear implant, with normal-hearing chronological age controls. The results showed that the categorical boundary was slightly more precise and that categorical perception was consistently larger in adults vs. normal-hearing children. Those among the deaf children who were able to discriminate minimal distinctions between syllables displayed categorical perception performances equivalent to those of normal-hearing controls. In conclusion, the late effect of age on the categorical perception of speech seems to be anchored in a fairly mature phonological system, as evidenced the fairly high precision of categorical boundaries in pre-adolescents. These late developments have functional implications for speech perception in difficult conditions as suggested by the relationship between categorical perception and speech intelligibility in cochlear implant children.
This paper describes the processing of MRI and CT images needed for developing a 3D linear articulatory model of velum. The 3D surface that defines each organ constitutive of the vocal and nasal tracts is extracted from MRI and CT images recorded on a subject uttering a corpus of artificially sustained French vowels and consonants. First, the 2D contours of the organs have been manually extracted from the corresponding images, expanded into 3D contours, and aligned in a common 3D coordinate system. Then, for each organ, a generic mesh has been chosen and fitted by elastic deformation to each of the 46 3D shapes of the corpus. This has finally resulted in a set of organ surfaces sampled with the same number of 3D vertices for each articulation, which is appropriate for Principal Component Analysis or linear decomposition. The analysis of these data has uncovered two main uncorrelated articulatory degrees of freedom for the velum's movement. The associated parameters are used to control the model. We have in particular investigated the question of a possible correlation between jaw / tongue and velum's movement and have not find more correlation than the one found in the corpus.
This paper contributes to the understanding of vocal folds oscillation during phonation. In order to test theoretical models of phonation, a new experimental set-up using a deformable vocal folds replica is presented. The replica is shown to be able to produce self sustained oscillations under controlled experimental conditions. Therefore different parameters, such as those related to elasticity, to acoustical coupling or to the subglottal pressure can be quantitatively studied. In this work we focused on the oscillation fundamental frequency and the upstream pressure in order to start (on-set threshold) either end (off-set threshold) oscillations in presence of a downstream acoustical resonator. As an example, it is shown how this data can be used in order to test the theoretical predictions of a simple one-mass model.
A visual articulatory model and its application to therapy
of speech disorders : a pilot study
(2005)
A visual articulatory model based on static MRI-data of isolated sounds and its application in therapy of speech disorders is described. The model is capable of generating video sequences of articulatory movements or still images of articulatory target positions within the midsagittal plane. On the basis of this model (1) a visual stimulation technique for the therapy of patients suffering from speech disorders and (2) a rating test for visual recognition of speech movements was developed. Results indicate that patients produce recognition rates above level of chance already without any training and that patients are capable of increasing their recognition rate over the time course of therapy significantly.
In order to investigate the articulatory processes of the hasty and mumbled speech of clutterers, the kinematic variability was analysed by means of electromagnetic midsagittal articulography (EMMA). In contrast to stutterers, clutterers improve their intelligibility by concentrating on their speech task. Variability is an important criterion in comparable studies of stuttering and is discussed in terms of the stability of the speech motor system. The aim of the current study was to analyse the spatial and temporal variability in the speech of three clutterers and three control speakers. All speakers were native speakers of German. The speech material consisted of repetitive CV-syllables and foreign words, because clutterers have the most severe problems with long words which have a complex syllable structure. The results showed a higher quotient of variation for clutterers in the foreign word production. For the syllable repetition task, no significant differences between clutterers and controls were found. The extremely large and variable displacements were interpreted as a strategy that helps clutterers to improve the intelligibility of their speech.
This paper summarizes our research efforts in functional modelling of the relationship between the acoustic properties of vowels and perceived vowel quality. Our model is trained on 164 short steady-state stimuli. We measured F1, F2, and additionally F0 since the effect of F0 on perceptual vowel height is evident. 40 phonetically skilled subjects judged vowel quality using the Cardinal Vowel diagram. The main focus is on refining the model and describing its transformation properties between the F1/F2 formant chart and the Cardinal Vowel diagram. An evaluation of the model based on 48 additional vowels showed the generalizability of the model and confirmed that it predicts perceived vowel quality with sufficient accuracy.
We measure face deformations during speech production using a motion capture system, which provides 3D coordinate data of about 60 markers glued on the speaker's face. An arbitrary orthogonal factor analysis followed by a principal component analysis (together called a guided PCA) of the data has showed that the first 6 factors explain about 90% of the variance, for each of our 3 speakers. The 6 derived factors, therefore, allow us to efficiently analyze or to reconstruct with a reasonable accuracy the observed face deformations. Since these factors can be interpreted in articulatory terms, they can reveal underlying articulatory organizations. The comparison of lip gestures in terms of data derived factors suggests that these speakers differently maneuver the lips to achieve contrast between /s/ and /R/. Such inter-speaker variability can occur because the acoustic contrast of these fricatives is shaped not only by the lip tube but also by cavities inside the mouth such as the sublingual cavity. In other words, these tube and cavity can acoustically compensate each other to produce their required acoustic properties.
The contribution of von Kempelen's "Mechanism of Speech" to the 'phonetic sciences' will be analyzed with respect to his theoretical reasoning on speech and speech production on the one hand and on the other in connection with his practical insights during his struggle in constructing a speaking machine. Whereas in his theoretical considerations von Kempelen's view is focussed on the natural functioning of the speech organs – cf. his membraneous glottis model – in constructing his speaking machine he clearly orientates himself towards the auditory result – cf. the bag pipe model for the sound generator used for the speaking machine instead. Concerning vowel production his theoretical description remains questionable, but his practical insight that vowels and speech sounds in general are only perceived correctly in connection with their surrounding sounds – i.e. the discovery of coarticulation – is clearly a milestone in the development of the phonetic sciences: He therefore dispenses with the Kratzenstein tubes, although they might have been based on more thorough acoustic modelling.
Finally, von Kempelen's model of speech production will be discussed in relation to the discussion of the acoustic nature of vowels afterwards [Willis and Wheatstone as well as von Helmholtz and Hermann in the 19th century and Stumpf, Chiba & Kajiyama as well as Fant and Ungeheuer in the 20th century].
In order to understand the functional morphology of the human voice producing system, we are in need of data on the vocal tract anatomy of other mammalian species. The larynges and vocal tracts of four species of Artiodactyla were investigated in combination with acoustic analyses of their respective calls. Different evolutionary specializations of laryngeal characters may lead to similar effects on sound production. In the investigated species, such specializations are: the elongation and mass increase of the vocal folds, the volume increase of the laryngeal vestibulum by an enlarged thyroid cartilage and the formation of laryngeal ventricles. Both the elongation of the vocal folds and the increase of the oscillating masses lower the fundamental frequency. The influence of an increased volume of the laryngeal vestibulum on sound production remains unclear. The anatomical and acoustic results are presented together with considerations about the habitats and the mating systems of the respective species.
Four speakers repeated 8 times 15 sentences containing 'pVp' syllables (V being /a/, /i/ and /u/). The 'pVp' syllables were located in final, penultimate and antepenultimate position relatively to the Intonational Phrase (IP) boundary. They were embedded in lexical words of 1-3 syllables and were either word-initial or word-final. Results show that the closer the vowel in word-final position is to the IP boundary, the longer the duration and the higher the fundamental frequency of the vowel; it is also characterised by larger lip opening gestures. The potential reduction or coarticulation of vowels in wordinitial position compared to their counterparts in word-final position is discussed.
This paper examines how questions, both Wh-questions and yes-no questions, are phrased in Chimwiini, a Bantu language spoken in southern Somalia. Questions do not require any special phrasing principles, but Wh-questions do provide much evidence in support of the principle Align-Foc R, which requires that focused or emphasized words/constituents be located at the end of a phonological phrase. Question words and enclitics are always focused and thus appear at the end of a phrase. Although questions do not require any new phrasing principles, they do display complex accentual (tonal) behavior. This paper attempts to provide an account of these accentual phenomena.