Acceptability judgments are a primary source of evidence in formal linguistic research. Within the generative linguistic tradition, these judgments are attributed to evaluation of novel forms based ...on implicit knowledge of rules or constraints governing well-formedness. In the domain of phonological acceptability judgments, other factors including ease of articulation and similarity to known forms have been hypothesized to influence evaluation. We used data-driven neural techniques to identify the relative contributions of these factors. Granger causality analysis of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-constrained magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) data revealed patterns of interaction between brain regions that support explicit judgments of the phonological acceptability of spoken nonwords. Comparisons of data obtained with nonwords that varied in terms of onset consonant cluster attestation and acceptability revealed different cortical regions and effective connectivity patterns associated with phonological acceptability judgments. Attested forms produced stronger influences of brain regions implicated in lexical representation and sensorimotor simulation on acoustic-phonetic regions, whereas unattested forms produced stronger influence of phonological control mechanisms on acoustic-phonetic processing. Unacceptable forms produced widespread patterns of interaction consistent with attempted search or repair. Together, these results suggest that speakers' phonological acceptability judgments reflect lexical and sensorimotor factors.
This study aimed to assess what we refer to as
and its forensic implications in comparisons performed in different speaking styles: spontaneous dialogues vs. interviews. We also addressed the impact ...of data sampling on the speaker's discriminatory performance concerning different acoustic-phonetic estimates. The participants were 20 male speakers, Brazilian Portuguese speakers from the same dialectal area. The speech material consisted of spontaneous telephone conversations between familiar individuals, and interviews conducted between each individual participant and the researcher. Nine acoustic-phonetic parameters were chosen for the comparisons, spanning from temporal and melodic to spectral acoustic-phonetic estimates. Ultimately, an analysis based on the combination of different parameters was also conducted. Two speaker discriminatory metrics were examined: Cost Log-likelihood-ratio (
) and Equal Error Rate (
) values. A general speaker discriminatory trend was suggested when assessing the parameters individually. Parameters pertaining to the temporal acoustic-phonetic class depicted the weakest performance in terms of speaker contrasting power as evidenced by the relatively higher
and
values. Moreover, from the set of acoustic parameters assessed, spectral parameters, mainly high formant frequencies, i.e., F3 and F4, were the best performing in terms of speaker discrimination, depicting the lowest
and
scores. The results appear to suggest a speaker discriminatory power
concerning parameters from different acoustic-phonetic classes, in which temporal parameters tended to present a lower discriminatory power. The speaking style mismatch also seemed to considerably impact the speaker comparison task, by undermining the overall discriminatory performance. A statistical model based on the combination of different acoustic-phonetic estimates was found to perform best in this case. Finally,
has proven to be of crucial relevance for the reliability of discriminatory power assessment.
Schwa has been somewhat neglected in studies of spontaneous speech. This thesis addresses this gap by providing a detailed investigation of acoustic variation in schwa according to a number of ...variables. Large amounts of spontaneous speech are analysed from two different varieties of English; Derby, UK (Milroy et al, 1996), and New Zealand English (Gordon et al, 2007). The work in this thesis contributes to the understanding of unstressed vowels in English in a number of ways. It is shown that schwa is distinct from /ɪ/ in unstressed syllables, although I also show that the way in which these vowel qualities are distributed differs amongst speakers. In addition, an extensive methodological analysis is presented, which explores the way that automated measurements of unstressed vowels can be filtered in order to make them suitable for analysis. The thesis also contributes to debates about whether schwa has a phonetic target (cf. Browman and Goldstein, 1992; Flemming, 2009). A phonetic distinction between schwas that occur before a pause and before a consonant is found. Schwas before a pause are lower vowels and are also less variable in backness. Conversely, many pre-consonantal schwas are quite high in realisation, and vary widely in backness. However, when variation within schwa is considered, the evidence clearly points towards it having a phonetic target. Variation in schwa is explored according to its formant trajectory, its length, and also according to speaker year of birth. Clear evidence of schwa moving towards a phonetic target as it gets longer is found. Longer schwas are overall lower vowels, and also less variable in backness. Evidence of schwa undergoing change over time is also provided, with schwa having undergone substantial lowering in New Zealand English. Overall, the findings in this thesis provide clear evidence that schwa has a phonetic target.
Eski Türkçe döneminden beri Türkçenin en çok etkileşime girdiǧi diller Farsça ve Arapçadır. Yüzyıllar süren etkileşim boyunca bu dillerden Türkçeye birçok kelime, tamlama, ek vb. dil öǧeleri ...ginniştir. Bu yazıda Arapça kelife (¿iŞ) üçlüsünden türemiş olup bir kısım Eski Anadolu ve Osmanii Türkçesi döneminde, bir kısmı aǧızlarda, bir kısmı da hâlen edebî dilde kullanılan söz varlıklan ele alındı. Bu söz varlıklannın pek çoǧunun kaynak dil Arapçada ve aracı dil Farsçada olmadıǧı, Türkçede üretildiǧi tespit edildi. Arapça kelife kökünden türemiş olan külfet, külef mükellef mükellefe, mükellefin, mükellefiyet, mütekellif, mütekellifin, tekalif, tekellüf, tekellüfât, teklif teklîfat, teklifi gibi 14 kelimeden oluşturulmuş Türkçe söz varlıǧının sayısı 90'dır. Bu kelimelerden bazılan Arapça kurallara göre yapılmış çokluk şekilleridir. Türkçede bu kelimelerden türetilen söz varlıklannın 23 'ü fiildir. Bu fiillerden l'i fiil yapma ekiyle, diǧerleri yardımcı fiiller ile oluşturulmuştur. Yine bu söz varlıklannın 4'ü Arapça asıllanndan bazı ses olaylan sonucunda Türkçenin ses özelliklerine uydurulmuş kelimelerdir. Sonuç bölümünde detaylı dökümünü verdiǧimiz bu söz varlıklannın bir kısım Farsça bir kısmı Türkçe kurallarla oluşturulmuş kelime gruplandır.
In the assessment of spoken production, numerous reasons can be identified behind the decisions that raters make in evaluating samples of oral performance. Inter and intra rater factors are ...relatively well documented in various reliability and validity studies. Some that have been identified in literature involve the effects of examinee pairing or the familiarity with the examinees, others point in the direction of gender and gender role perceptions O’Sullivan (2008), others appear to be connected with body language and non-verbal cues that accompany oral production (cf.: Krahmer and Swerts 2004, Seiter, Weger, Jensen and Kinzer 2010). While some studies that address the assessment of speaking English in exam contexts suggest that raters may not feel as comfortable assessing pronunciation as they do other aspects of a speaker’s performance (Orr 2002, Hubbard, Gilbert and Pidcock 2006, Brown 2006, De Velle 2008), more recent investigations of rater behaviour involving electronic evidence from training, maintenance and online examination programmes tentatively show that pronunciation, in fact, is the first category examiners attend to (Hubbard 2011, Chambers and Ingham 2011, Krakowian 2011, Seed 2012, Tynan 2015, Kang and Ginther 2019). This paper looks at large collection of assessments stored in an electronic system to investigate what raters really seem to pay attention to when allegedly following rating scales.
Prosodic structure has been assumed to serve as a frame for articulation, so that phonetic shaping of phonological representations is fine‐tuned as a function of the prosodic system of the language. ...The intricate relationship between phonetics and prosodic structure has been explored in the literature under the rubric of the phonetics–prosody interface. This paper reviews various aspects of the phonetics–prosody interface and discusses how prosodic structure modulates phonetic realization within and across languages. A particular attention is paid to boundary‐related prosodic strengthening (i.e., spatial and/or temporal expansion of articulation that arises in the vicinity of prosodic junctures), especially in association with domain‐initial positions (also known as domain‐initial strengthening, DIS, effects). Prosodic boundary strengthening is further discussed in terms of how it is language‐specifically fine‐tuned, how it is understood in dynamical terms, and how it relates to linguistic functions (as syntagmatic vs. paradigmatic contrast enhancement) that are all further conditioned by other factors of the linguistic sound system of individual languages such as the prominence system and the phonetic feature system.
"This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It’s a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age ...or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training. English spelling is notoriously complicated and difficult to learn; it is correctly described as much less regular and predictable than any other alphabetic orthography. However, there is more regularity in the English spelling system than is generally appreciated. This book provides, for the first time, a thorough account of the whole complex system. It does so by describing how phonemes relate to graphemes and vice versa. It enables searches for particular words, so that one can easily find, not the meanings or pronunciations of words, but the other words with which those with unusual phoneme-grapheme/grapheme-phoneme correspondences keep company. Other unique features of this book include teacher-friendly lists of correspondences and various regularities not described by previous authorities, for example the strong tendency for the letter-name vowel phonemes (the names of the letters <a, e, i, o, u>) to be spelt with those single letters in non-final syllables."
The paper reports on an empirical study which aims at verifying a frequent claim concerning the restriction on the formation of feminine nouns posed by consonant clusters emerging on the attachment ...of the suffix -ka to masculine stems. We provide evidence that only one of the 20 nouns used in the experiment, i.e. adiunktka has proved to be difficult for the participants to pronounce by while the remaining items such as architektka and chirurżka were rather easy or easy to articulate.
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