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.
Speech is central to communication among humans. Meaning is largely conveyed by the selection of linguistic units such as words, phrases and sentences. However, prosody, that is the variation of ...acoustic cues that tie linguistic segments together, adds another layer of meaning. There are various features underlying prosody, one of the most important being pitch and how it is modulated. Recent fMRI and ECoG studies have suggested that there are cortical regions for pitch which respond primarily to resolved harmonics and that high‐gamma cortical activity encodes intonation as represented by relative pitch. Importantly, this latter result was shown to be independent of the cortical tracking of the acoustic energy of speech, a commonly used measure. Here, we investigate whether we can isolate low‐frequency EEG indices of pitch processing of continuous narrative speech from those reflecting the tracking of other acoustic and phonetic features. Harmonic resolvability was found to contain unique predictive power in delta and theta phase, but it was highly correlated with the envelope and tracked even when stimuli were pitch‐impoverished. As such, we are circumspect about whether its contribution is truly pitch‐specific. Crucially however, we found a unique contribution of relative pitch to EEG delta‐phase prediction, and this tracking was absent when subjects listened to pitch‐impoverished stimuli. This finding suggests the possibility of a separate processing stream for prosody that might operate in parallel to acoustic–linguistic processing. Furthermore, it provides a novel neural index that could be useful for testing prosodic encoding in populations with speech processing deficits and for improving cognitively controlled hearing aids.
Prosody is an important aspect of speech that adds another layer of meaning to words. Here, we investigated the encoding of pitch, the modulation of which underlies various prosodic phenomena, during listening to continuous narrative speech in ongoing scalp‐recorded electroencephalography (EEG). A unique contribution of relative pitch (frel) to EEG delta‐phase prediction was found, and crucially, this tracking was absent when subjects listened to pitch‐impoverished stimuli.
A parallel is drawn between the northernmost regions of England represented by Durham and Yorkshire and the transition zone Ouddeken (2016) identifies between voicing and aspiration languages in the ...Dutch-German dialect continuum. It is argued that, owing to historical changes and dialect contact, the Northern Englishes discussed exhibit hybrid laryngeal systems as a result of being geographically intermediate between Scots in Scotland, which is a voice language similar to Dutch, and mainstream varieties of English spoken more to the south in England (and in most of the rest of the English-speaking world), which are aspiration systems of the German type. We model the emergence of laryngeal systems as the setting of three parameters: (i) whether the laryngeally marked/specified obstruent series contains voice (L-system) or asp (H-system); (ii) whether the laryngeal prime is able to spread (right-to-left); and (iii) whether the system has pre-obstruent delaryngealisation (POD) (due to which in C1C2, C1 becomes unmarked/underspecified). While spreading L with POD derives voice languages and non-spreading H with no POD derives aspiration languages, two mixed combinations derive the intermediate categories of Durham and Yorkshire (spreading L & no POD and spreading H & no POD, respectively). We also show that all remaining combinations are attested cross-linguistically or else theoretically uninterpretable.
This paper discusses the assumptions of a Multi-Layer Transcription Model (hereinafter: MLTM). The solution presented is an advanced grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) conversion method that can be ...implemented in technical applications, such as automatic speech recognition and synthesis systems. The features of MLTM also facilitate the application of text-to-transcription conversion in linguistic research. The model presented here is the basis for multi-step processing of the orthographic representation of words with those being transcribed gradually. The consecutive stages of the procedure include, among other things, identification of multi-character phonemes, voicing status change, and consonant clusters simplification. The multi-layer model described in this paper makes it possible to assign individual phonetic processes (for example assimilation), as well as other types of transformation, to particular layers. As a result, the set of rules becomes more transparent. Moreover, the rules related to any process can be modified independently of the rules connected with other forms of transformation, provided that the latter have been assigned to a different layer. These properties of the multi-layer transcription model in question provide crucial advantages for the solutions based on it, such as their flexibility and transparency. There are no assumptions in the model about the applicable number of layers, their functions, or the number of rules defined in each layer. A special mechanism used for the implementation of the MLTM concept enables projection of individual characters onto either a phonemic or a phonetic transcript (obtained after processing in the final layer of the MLTM-based system has been completed). The solution presented in this text has been implemented for the Polish language, however, it is not impossible to use the same model for other languages.
This paper provides an acoustic description of /z/ and /zʕ/ in Tŝilhqot’in (Northern Dene). These sounds are noted by Cook (1993, 2013) to show lenition and some degree of laterality in coda ...position. Based on recordings made in 2014 with a single, mother-tongue speaker of Tŝilhqot’in, we describe their acoustic properties and examine their distribution as a function of prosodic position and segmental environment. We find that they vary along three dimensions: manner (fricative–approximant), degree of retraction (non-retracted–retracted), and laterality (non-lateral–lateral). In addition, some tokens have a characteristic ‘buzziness’, which has been associated with the Chinese front apical vowel (Shao & Ridouane 2018, 2019) and the Swedish ‘Viby-i’ (Westberger 2019). We argue that ‘lenition’ (Kirchner 2004, Ennever, Meakins & Round 2017) can only account for some of the observed variation and suggest that both /z/ and /zʕ/ are specified for two tongue articulations: tongue tip/blade and tongue body (Laver 1994), encompassing laterality (and concomitant retraction) in addition to the primary coronal gesture.
Speech consists of a continuously-varying acoustic signal. Yet human listeners experience it as sequences of discrete speech sounds, which are used to recognise discrete words. To examine how the ...human brain appropriately sequences the speech signal, we recorded two-hour magnetoencephalograms from 21 participants listening to short narratives. Our analyses show that the brain continuously encodes the three most recently heard speech sounds in parallel, and maintains this information long past its dissipation from the sensory input. Each speech sound representation evolves over time, jointly encoding both its phonetic features and the amount of time elapsed since onset. As a result, this dynamic neural pattern encodes both the relative order and phonetic content of the speech sequence. These representations are active earlier when phonemes are more predictable, and are sustained longer when lexical identity is uncertain. Our results show how phonetic sequences in natural speech are represented at the level of populations of neurons, providing insight into what intermediary representations exist between the sensory input and sub-lexical units. The flexibility in the dynamics of these representations paves the way for further understanding of how such sequences may be used to interface with higher order structure such as lexical identity.
The human superior temporal gyrus (STG) is critical for extracting meaningful linguistic features from speech input. Local neural populations are tuned to acoustic-phonetic features of all consonants ...and vowels and to dynamic cues for intonational pitch. These populations are embedded throughout broader functional zones that are sensitive to amplitude-based temporal cues. Beyond speech features, STG representations are strongly modulated by learned knowledge and perceptual goals. Currently, a major challenge is to understand how these features are integrated across space and time in the brain during natural speech comprehension. We present a theory that temporally recurrent connections within STG generate context-dependent phonological representations, spanning longer temporal sequences relevant for coherent percepts of syllables, words, and phrases.
The human superior temporal gyrus (STG) encodes phonological features relevant for speech perception. Yi et al. describe how direct human neurophysiology has revealed the local and context-dependent nature of STG representations and propose a theory for temporal binding in speech.
Abstract
Recent work on the acoustic properties of complex words has found that morphological information may influence the phonetic properties of words, e.g. acoustic duration. Paradigm uniformity ...has been proposed as one mechanism that may cause such effects. In a recent experimental study
Seyfarth et al. (2017)
found that the stems of English inflected words (e.g.
frees
) have a longer duration than the same string of segments in a homophonous mono-morphemic word (e.g.
freeze
), due to the co-activation of the longer articulatory gesture of the bare stem (e.g.
free
). However, not all effects predicted by paradigm uniformity were found in that study, and the role of frequency-related phonetic reduction remained inconclusive. The present paper tries to replicate the effect using conversational speech data from a different variety of English (i.e. New Zealand English), using the QuakeBox Corpus (
Walsh et al. 2013
). In the presence of word-form frequency as a predictor, stems of plurals were not found to be significantly longer than the corresponding strings of comparable non-complex words. The analysis revealed, however, a frequency-induced gradient paradigm uniformity effect: plural stems become shorter with increasing frequency of the bare stem.
Foreword to the special section Dziubalska-Kolaczyk, Katarzyna; Wojtkowiak, Ewelina
Yearbook of the Poznan Linguistic Meeting,
09/2021, Letnik:
7, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This is the foreword to the special section with articles from the PLM2019 session titled “Modern phonetics and phonological representation: a new outlook on an old controversy”.
This article looks at the ongoing merger of /uː/ or /ɔː/ before tautosyllabic /l/, that is, words like call(ing) and cool(ing) in London English, the reasons for this merger and how it can be ...captured formally. It argues that the merger is the end point of a chain of phonological consequences of a phonetic process, the gradient fronting of /uː/, which leads to a reorganisation of the vowel system. The merger can thus only be understood by looking at the properties of London (Cockney) phonology and ongoing changes in this system. On the theoretical level, this article argues that underspecification in feature theory is crucial to understand the interaction between phonetic variation and phonological change, arguing that the vowel shifts in London English start out as phonetic changes along dimensions that are featurally underspecified. Underspecification thus provides a crucial link between phonological categories and phonetic gradience.
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