The Semantics of Word Division in Northwest Semitic Writing Systems

Much focus in writing systems research has been on the correspondences on the level of the grapheme/phoneme. Seeking to complement these, this monograph considers the targets of graphic word-level units in natural language, focusing on ancient North West Semitic (NWS) writing systems, principally Hebrew, Aramaic, Phoenician and Ugaritic. While in Modern European languages word division tends to mark-up morphosyntactic elements, in most NWS writing systems word division is argued to target prosodic units, whereby written ‘words’ consist of units which must be pronounced together with a single primary accent or stress. This is opposed to other possibilities including Semantic word division, as seen in Middle Egyptian hieroglyphic.  The monograph starts by considering word division in a source where, unlike the rest of the material considered, the phonology is well represented, the medieval tradition of Tiberian Hebrew and Aramaic. There word division is found to mark-up ‘minimal prosodic words’, i.e. units that must under any circumstances be pronounced together as a single phonological unit. After considering the Sitz im Leben of such a word division strategy, the monograph moves on to compare Tiberian word division with that in early epigraphic NWS, where it is shown that orthographic wordhood has an almost identical distribution. The most economical explanation for this is argued to be that word division has the same underlying basis in NWS writing since the earliest times. Thereafter word division in Ugaritic alphabetic cuneiform is considered, where two word division strategies are identified, corresponding broadly to two genres of text, poetry and prose. 'Poetic' word division is taken as an instance of mainstream ‘prosodic word division’, while the other is morphosyntactic in scope anticipating later word division strategies in Europe by several centuries. Finally, the monograph considers the digital encoding of word division in NWS texts, especially the difficulties, as well as potential solutions to, the problem of marking up texts with overlapping, viz. morphosyntactic and prosodic, analyses

Cross-Linguistic Perception and Learning of Japanese Lexical Prosody by English Listeners

xviii, 216 p. : ill. (some col.)The focus of this dissertation is on how language experience shapes perception of a non-native prosodic contrast. In Tokyo Japanese, fundamental frequency (F0) peak and fall are acoustic cues to lexically contrastive pitch patterns, in which a word may be accented on a particular syllable or unaccented (e.g., tsúru 'a crane', tsurú 'a vine', tsuru 'to fish'). In English, lexical stress is obligatory, and it may be reinforced by F0 in higher-level prosodic groupings. Here I investigate whether English listeners can attend to F0 peaks as well as falls in contrastive pitch patterns and whether training can facilitate the learning of prosodic categories. In a series of categorization and discrimination experiments, where F0 peak and fall were manipulated in one-word utterances, the judgments of prominence by naïve English listeners and native Japanese listeners were compared. The results indicated that while English listeners had phonetic sensitivity to F0 fall in a same-different discrimination task, they could not consistently use the F0 fall to categorize F0 patterns. The effects of F0 peak location and F0 fall on prominence judgments were always larger for Japanese listeners than for English listeners. Furthermore, the interaction between these acoustic cues affected perception of the contrast by Japanese, but not English, listeners. This result suggests that native, but not non-native, listeners have complex and integrated processing of these cues. The training experiment assessed improvement in categorization of Japanese pitch patterns with exposure and feedback. The results suggested that training improved identification of the accented patterns, which also generalized to new words and new contexts. Identification of the unaccented pattern, on the other hand, showed no improvement. Error analysis indicated that native English listeners did not learn to attend specifically to the lack of the F0 fall. To conclude, language experience influences perception of prosodic categories. Although there is some sensitivity to F0 fall in non-native listeners, they rely mostly on F0 peak location in language-like tasks such as categorization of pitch patterns. Learning of new prosodic categories is possible. However, not all categories are learned equally well, which suggests that first language attentional biases affect second language acquisition in the prosodic domain.Committee in charge: Susan Guion Anderson, Chairperson; Melissa A. Redford, Member; Vsevolod Kapatsinki, Member; Kaori Idemaru, Outside Membe

The Information Status of Nominal and Verbal Expressions: Intonational Evidence from Production and Perception in German

The overall goal of this thesis is to shed light on the relation between information structure and prosody, in particular with respect to the dimension of given versus new information (givenness or information status). According to the activation cost model proposed by Chafe (1994) and Lambrecht (1994) givenness is defined as the degree of activation of an idea or concept assumed by the speaker to be in the listener’s consciousness at the time of utterance. The concept of activation is actually understood to be potentially continuous. The general aim of this thesis is to find further evidence for the basic assumption that (stepwise) changes in the degree of an entity’s givenness are linguistically reflected in corresponding (stepwise) changes in its degree of prosodic prominence (pronounced activation cost). Evidence for this correlation was obtained by means of production and perception data on read German. Variation in activation or givenness are assumed to be reflected in respective variations in the probability and appropriateness of particular prosodic realizations. This thesis presents two perception experiments on referential givenness and a production experiment plus a follow-up perception experiment on semantic relations between verbs and nouns. In contrast to other experimental approaches on the prosodic marking of givenness, the experimental results of this thesis additionally reveal insights into the coding of givenness by prosodic means alone and the informativeness of verbs. The perception experiments on referential givenness aim to investigate to what extent a range of well-established types of German accents have an effect on the listener’s perception of a referent’s level of givenness, both in sentences in isolation and in context. The main findings are that these different accent types, different accent positions (nuclear, prenuclear) and the presence or absence of accent, significantly influence a referent’s perceived degree of givenness. In particular, results reveal a stepwise decrease in the degree of perceived givenness from deaccentuation and prenuclear accents through low and early peak (falling) nuclear accents to high and rising nuclear accents. Accordingly, the absence of an accent and different accent positions differ in their appropriateness as a prosodic marker of different degrees of givenness (i.e. from given through textually and inferentially accessible to new referents) in German. The production and perception experiments on semantic relations between different parts of speech were used to investigate the encoding and decoding of the informativeness of verbs in German. Pairs of target verbs and nouns were either semantically unrelated (i.e. new) or related to each other in different ways. In a production study eliciting read speech, these differences in semantic relatedness were found to be expressed in the prosodic realization of the target words, with nuclear accents being more frequent on less related targets. This preference was reflected in appropriateness ratings in a follow-up perception study that investigated nuclear accent placement. The experimental results of this thesis reveal, in particular, differences in the pronounced probability and perceived appropriateness of nuclear accent placement (and deaccentuation) as a function of an entity’s information status. These differences provide evidence for the relevance of different intermediate levels of cognitive activation between the active and inactive poles, indicating that the notion of information status involves gradient variations rather than categorical distinctions. Furthermore, the informativeness of verbs has been found to affect the prosodic form of an utterance just like nouns/referents. Hence, results suggest that verbs serve not only as a source for a noun’s level of givenness but can also be assigned an information status themselves. Verbal expressions are not per se referential, but the ideas they express may be activated to a greater or lesser extent at a lexical level, which indicates the need to distinguish between a referential and a lexical level of information status

The Synchronic and Diachronic Phonology of Nauruan: Towards a Definitive Classification of an Understudied Micronesian Language

Nauruan is a Micronesian language spoken in the Republic of Nauru, a small island nation in the central Pacific. Lack of data and difficulty in analysis has hindered progress in better understanding Nauruan for decades, particularly regarding its phonology and its classification within the Micronesian family. Because of these challenges, earlier researchers have presented their work on Nauruan as highly tentative. This dissertation establishes more confident analyses of Nauruan phonology, sound change and classification, which have been made possible through original fieldwork. Approximately one hundred hours of digital recordings have been collected as part of this research, including wordlists, phrases, narratives, and spontaneous speech and conversation. Seventeen individual Nauruan speakers contributed to this work. This diverse body of data has allowed for much needed insight into the Nauruan language and its relation to the other Micronesian languages. A revised Nauruan phoneme inventory is proposed and a range of associated phonological processes are identified and discussed. Particular attention is paid to the phonetics of Nauruan speech sounds, including articulatory and acoustic properties of consonants and vowels. Also included is an analysis of Nauruan stress and prosody. Nauruan is shown to have a weight-sensitive stress system, as is typical of Micronesian languages. The prevailing view on Nauruan classification has been that it is a Micronesian language that should be classified apart from all other members of the family. This classification is based on little Nauruan data and should be reevaluated. To this end, this dissertation compiles nearly 300 lexical comparisons and shows regular sound correspondences between Nauruan, Proto‑Micronesian and individual Micronesian languages. Additionally, a range of Nauruan morphological paradigms are shown to have parallels across the Micronesian family. The analysis supports classifying Nauruan as a Micronesian language but has produced no compelling evidence for classifying Nauruan apart from the nuclear Micronesian group. As such, the nuclear/non-nuclear distinction within the family appears to be unnecessary. The evidence suggests that all Micronesian languages, including Nauruan, have descended from Proto-Micronesian. Possible classifications for Nauruan within the Micronesian family are discussed and evaluated. Several stages of pre‑Nauruan are also reconstructed, which suggests that Nauruan has undergone a significant degree of internal sound change. This may have contributed to earlier perceptions of Nauruan as a non-nuclear Micronesian language

Investigating the build-up of precedence effect using reflection masking

The auditory processing level involved in the build‐up of precedence [Freyman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 874–884 (1991)] has been investigated here by employing reflection masked threshold (RMT) techniques. Given that RMT techniques are generally assumed to address lower levels of the auditory signal processing, such an approach represents a bottom‐up approach to the buildup of precedence. Three conditioner configurations measuring a possible buildup of reflection suppression were compared to the baseline RMT for four reflection delays ranging from 2.5–15 ms. No buildup of reflection suppression was observed for any of the conditioner configurations. Buildup of template (decrease in RMT for two of the conditioners), on the other hand, was found to be delay dependent. For five of six listeners, with reflection delay=2.5 and 15 ms, RMT decreased relative to the baseline. For 5‐ and 10‐ms delay, no change in threshold was observed. It is concluded that the low‐level auditory processing involved in RMT is not sufficient to realize a buildup of reflection suppression. This confirms suggestions that higher level processing is involved in PE buildup. The observed enhancement of reflection detection (RMT) may contribute to active suppression at higher processing levels

Learning disentangled speech representations

A variety of informational factors are contained within the speech signal and a single short recording of speech reveals much more than the spoken words. The best method to extract and represent informational factors from the speech signal ultimately depends on which informational factors are desired and how they will be used. In addition, sometimes methods will capture more than one informational factor at the same time such as speaker identity, spoken content, and speaker prosody. The goal of this dissertation is to explore different ways to deconstruct the speech signal into abstract representations that can be learned and later reused in various speech technology tasks. This task of deconstructing, also known as disentanglement, is a form of distributed representation learning. As a general approach to disentanglement, there are some guiding principles that elaborate what a learned representation should contain as well as how it should function. In particular, learned representations should contain all of the requisite information in a more compact manner, be interpretable, remove nuisance factors of irrelevant information, be useful in downstream tasks, and independent of the task at hand. The learned representations should also be able to answer counter-factual questions. In some cases, learned speech representations can be re-assembled in different ways according to the requirements of downstream applications. For example, in a voice conversion task, the speech content is retained while the speaker identity is changed. And in a content-privacy task, some targeted content may be concealed without affecting how surrounding words sound. While there is no single-best method to disentangle all types of factors, some end-to-end approaches demonstrate a promising degree of generalization to diverse speech tasks. This thesis explores a variety of use-cases for disentangled representations including phone recognition, speaker diarization, linguistic code-switching, voice conversion, and content-based privacy masking. Speech representations can also be utilised for automatically assessing the quality and authenticity of speech, such as automatic MOS ratings or detecting deep fakes. The meaning of the term "disentanglement" is not well defined in previous work, and it has acquired several meanings depending on the domain (e.g. image vs. speech). Sometimes the term "disentanglement" is used interchangeably with the term "factorization". This thesis proposes that disentanglement of speech is distinct, and offers a viewpoint of disentanglement that can be considered both theoretically and practically

Exploring the effects of accent on cognitive processes: behavioral and electrophysiological insights

167 p.Previous research has found that speaker accent can have an impact on a range of offline and online cognitive processes (Baus, Bas, Calabria, & Costa, 2017; McAleer, Todorov, & Belin, 2014; Stevenage, Clarke, & McNeill, 2012; Sporer, 2001). Indeed, previous studies show that there are differences in native and non-native speech processing (Lev-Ari, 2018). Processing foreign-accented speech requires the listener to adapt to an extra range of variability, suggesting that there may be an increase in the amount of attentional and cognitive resources that are needed to successfully interpret the speech signal of a foreign-accented speaker. However, less is known about the differences between processing native and dialectal accents. Is dialectal processing more similar to foreign or native speech? To address this, two theories have been proposed (Clarke & Garrett, 2004; Floccia et al, 2009). Previous studies have contributed to the plausibility of both hypotheses and importantly for the purposes of this project, previous electroencephalography experiments exploring the question have mainly used sentences as material. More studies are needed to elucidate whether foreign accent is processed uniquely from all types of native speech (both native and dialectal accents) or whether dialectal accent is treated differently from native accent, despite both being native speech variations. Accordingly, the central aim of this dissertation is to further investigate processing mechanisms of speech accent across different levels of linguistic analysis using evidence from both behavioral and electrophysiological experiments. An additional aim of this project was to look at the effects of accent on information retention. In addition to fluctuations in attentional demands, it seems that non-native accent can lead to differences in the depth of listeners¿ memory encoding (Atkinson et al., 2005). This project further aimed to study how changing the accent of the information delivered may affect how well people remember the information received. Three experiments were carried out to investigate accent processing, results and future directions are discussed

The phonetics of Modern (Israeli) Hebrew

It is the purpose of the present work to provide a description of the phonetics of Modern (Israeli) Hebrew. This it proceeds to do in five parts, leading (after an introduction) from the syllable and its segments, through the foot and the syntagm to connected discourse.The first part, an introduction, consists of two chapters; of these, the first gives a historical account of the revival of Hebrew and traces some of the socio-linguistic aspects connected with the * pronunciation of M.I.H. — more particularly outlining the major points distinguishing the two main dialectal varieties, Sabra Hebrew and Oriental Hebrew, and their various styles (of which this work will deal in particular with the Colloquial Style of Sabra Hebrew). The second chapter outlines the basic theory behind the description, as well as the methods by which it is to be conductedPart Two is in three chapters. The first of these attempts a phonological formulation of the M.I.H. syllable-structure, the second lists and describes the vowels, and the third does the same for the consonants and their phono-tactic patterning. The diagrams are based on palatograms and kymograms of M.I.H. citation-form speech, for which the author served as informant (the photographs of these materials are contained in Appendix iii). Statistical frequency-figures are also listed for the segments, and reference is made to their acoustic features.The third part deals with the foot, and is in two chapters, the first of which describes word-accent (an abstract potentiality) and the second rhythmical stress (a concrete realisation). A theoretical model is here developed — and continued in parts four and five — for the description of M.I.H. intonation-patterns.Part Four, describing the features of the syntagm, contains tluo chapters, the first of which lists and describes the intonationpatterns of [fl.I.H. according to a system of binary features, and the second of u/hich deals with segmental sound-changes in connected speech. The corpus of materials for this part (as well as for the one preceding and the one following it) consists of continuous Hebrew speech and -I'Z ii a * readings of The North Wind and the Sun, as well as modern Hebrew poetry, totalling some 90 minutes, as recorded by various native speakers of ffl.I.H. This material is transcribed (with tonetic notation) in Appendix ii. to this work, and a standardised phonemic transcription '' ii , , of the I.P.A piece, The North Wind and the Sun (with tonetic marks), followed by notes on the phonetic realisation of the phonemic segments, is contained in Appendix i, the tapes themselves being attached to the thesis.The final section — Part Five — also consists of two chapters, of which the first deals with tone-groups and the second contains notes on such para-linguistic features as kinesics and proxemics, vocalisations, articulatory set, phonation types and phonaesthesia. The work concludes with some general remarks to sum up the status of Modern (Israeli) Hebrew as a successfully revived national language. ihroughout this and the preceding two parts, reference is continually made to spectrographic materials connected with the corpus (the photographs of the actual materials being contained in Appendix iii), and to synthesis of ffl.I.H. speech with the aid of the Edinburgh University's Parametric Artificial Talker (PAT), evidence for which is likewise contained in Appendix iii.Footnotes are given on the pages of the text to which they refer, and there is therefore no separate footnote section at the end of the work, which concludes with a Bibliography in two sections, the first of which lists works of a general phonetic and linguistic nature, the second comprising only works referring to Hebrew specifically