An introductory reference guide to the cross-linguistic study of the consonants C/k/ and G/g/ from vulgar Latin to romance languages French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian in the initial, medial, and/or ending positions up to the 12th century, 2006

This dissertation proposes an analysis of the consonants C/k/ and G/g/ from Vulgar Latin to the five Romance Languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian in the initial, medial, and/or ending positions up to the 12th century. This study examined the evolution of C/k/ and G/g/ in each language while noting the history and cultures that impacted their evolution. I discuss how the spoken language of Italian evolved slowly from the late Vulgar Latin of the Empire, in close contact with the universal standard of Medieval Latin, yet is consistent with the rest of the languages in this study when it comes to consonants /b/ d/g/ being pronounced as plosives when they occur at the beginning of the word. I examine the similarities that persist in Romanian and Italian, in spite of Romanian's isolation from the other Romance languages. I selected these consonants based on the conjugation irregularity of Romance verbs. The findings reflect a consistent conclusion taking into account scribers' errors, political reformations and numerous wars: Relative to all the languages in this research: initial consonants, single or followed by another consonant, remained unchanged; less resistance is offered by intervocalic consonants that either weakened or just disappeared; and final unsupported (preceded by a vowel) consonants or supported (preceded by a consonant) either remained or disappeared, up to the twelfth century. Research also included such variables impacting the languages as cultural concerns; non-contact with other Romance languages; and, geographical isolation

“The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible”: Some reflections on the verbal morphophonology of Balearic Catalan

In Balearic Catalan, first person singular present indicative verb forms do not show an explicit inflectional morph, as do most dialects of Catalan. Among these forms, we find final consonant clusters that involve a violation of the sonority constraint according to which the degree of sonority between the segments of a syllable must be decreasing in relation to the nucleus. The same clusters in nominal inflection are resolved by means of a process of vowel epenthesis. The exceptional phonological behavior of these consonant clusters is not circumscribed to sonority factors, but also concerns the regular phonology of the dialect, either because a general process fails to apply, or because a process applies though the conditions that make it applicable are not visible. Previous approaches have analyzed these final consonant clusters, not as codas, but as onsets of empty nuclei: this exceptional syllabic status would, according to these proposals, throw some light on this peculiar phonological behavior. In this paper we investigate the theoretical problems deriving from approaches of this kind and demonstrate that they are better analyzed by considering paradigmatic effects, such as uniformity and contrast between the members of a morphological paradigm. Furthermore, we critically review the different theories developed in Optimality Theory in order to account for surface resemblances and dissimilarities between the members of a paradigm and introduce a detailed formalization of Paradigmatic Contrast

Allophonic Variation in the Spanish Sibilant Fricative

In Spanish, the phoneme /s/ has two variants: [z] occurs in the coda when preceding a voiced consonant, and [s] occurs elsewhere. However, recent research has revealed irregular voicing patterns with regards to this phone. This dissertation examines two of these allophonic variations. It first investigates how speech rate and speech formality contribute to the gradient and variable nature of the voicing assimilation rule. Next, it explores possible intervocalic /s/ voicing in Highland Colombian Spanish. In accordance with other studies, the results showed partial voicing of coda position /s/ before voiced consonants (25%-80% voiced frication noise). Furthermore, there was scarce evidence for intervocalic /s/ voicing in the Colombian data (3%-35% voiced frication noise). Both studies led to the same conclusion; that gestural blending is a prominent and frequently occurring process in Spanish. In both cases, the vocal chords begin to vibrate in anticipation of the following sound (either a voiced consonant or vowel) before the constriction needed to produce the fricative has ended. The data revealed that there is a significant correlation between speech rate and the degree to which the adjacent segments overlap with one another. However, speech formality does not appear to be a function of the gestural overlap. In addition to the two factors tested (speech rate and speech formality), this dissertation also provides other possible factors which may affect the degree to which segments overlap such as its position within the syllable (onset versus coda) and following segment type (vowel versus consonant)

The acquisition of voicing assimilation by advanced Hungarian learners of Spanish

This study examines the effect of explicit phonological instruction on the acquisition of variable /s/ voicing in Spanish by advanced Hungarian learners. Hungarian and Spanish have very similar yet not identical voicing assimilation (VA) systems; the most important difference lies in the pre-sonorant context as sonorant consonants trigger voicing assimilation in Spanish but not in Hungarian. Data were collected in acoustic experiments from 7 native speakers of Northern Peninsular Spanish and 12 Hungarian university students, advanced learners of Spanish. The latter group was tested twice: before and after a three-month Spanish phonetics and phonology course. Our data reveals that this amount of instruction is not enough for L2 speakers to overcome their L1 VA system, which might be attributed in part to the variable, allophonic nature of the process, the similarity between the two languages’ VA systems and lack of exposure to the relevant dialect

Catalan

This chapter presents a general overview of the phonetics and phonology of Catalan, taking into consideration both segmental and suprasegmental phenomena. The chapter provides an updated state-of-the-art report of the most recent investigations in this area. Though the report concentrates on the standard variety, Central Catalan, we also highlight the rich dialectal variation that affects both segmental and prosodic properties. After a brief introduction to the dialectal distribution of the language, the first part of the chapter is devoted to segmental phonology. In this part, we first present the basic segmen-tal inventories of the language, as well as syllable structure types; we then describe the phonological processes that affect both vocalic and consonantal systems. The prosodic part of the chapter covers the main prosodic characteristics of the language, followed by a description of the intonational variation found for a variety of sentence types

MISPRONUNCIATION DETECTION AND DIAGNOSIS IN MANDARIN ACCENTED ENGLISH SPEECH

This work presents the development, implementation, and evaluation of a Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) system, with application to pronunciation evaluation of Mandarin-accented English speech. A comprehensive detection and diagnosis of errors in the Electromagnetic Articulography corpus of Mandarin-Accented English (EMA-MAE) was performed by using the expert phonetic transcripts and an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system. Articulatory features derived from the parallel kinematic data available in the EMA-MAE corpus were used to identify the most significant articulatory error patterns seen in L2 speakers during common mispronunciations. Using both acoustic and articulatory information, an ASR based Mispronunciation Detection and Diagnosis (MDD) system was built and evaluated across different feature combinations and Deep Neural Network (DNN) architectures. The MDD system captured mispronunciation errors with a detection accuracy of 82.4%, a diagnostic accuracy of 75.8% and a false rejection rate of 17.2%. The results demonstrate the advantage of using articulatory features in revealing the significant contributors of mispronunciation as well as improving the performance of MDD systems

Rhotics.New Data and Perspectives

This book provides an insight into the patterns of variation and change of rhotics in different languages and from a variety of perspectives. It sheds light on the phonetics, the phonology, the socio-linguistics and the acquisition of /r/-sounds in languages as diverse as Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Kuikuro, Malayalam, Romanian, Slovak, Tyrolean and Washili Shingazidja thus contributing to the discussion on the unity and uniqueness of this group of sounds

Vowel compression in Altiplateau Mexican Spanish

This paper presents an exploratory study of coda-driven vowel compression in Altiplateau Mexican Spanish (AMS). Previous research has led to the claim that pan-dialectal, coda-driven compression does not occur in Spanish and that, instead, only onset complexity drives the shortening of following vowels (Aldrich & Simonet 2019). Based on acoustic analysis of continuously read speech, we find that mid and low vowels in AMS centralise in closed unstressed syllables, and they also display significant shortening in CVC contexts (relative to their uncompressed duration in CV syllables). By contrast, onset complexity does not induce significant compression in our data. Inferential testing confirms that it is an interaction between stress and syllable structure (i.e. coda presence in unstressed syllables) that is most significant in driving both qualitative and quantitative compression. We argue that phonologically constrained, coda-driven compression occurs in Spanish, but it is dialect-specific and stress-dependent. We consider the implications of these variety-specific patterns in the context of debates concerning Spanish resyllabification, phonological rhythm and the acoustic marking of stress

Learning [Voice]

The [voice] distinction between homorganic stops and fricatives is made by a number of acoustic correlates including voicing, segment duration, and preceding vowel duration. The present work looks at [voice] from a number of multidimensional perspectives. This dissertation\u27s focus is a corpus study of the phonetic realization of [voice] in two English-learning infants aged 1;1--3;5. While preceding vowel duration has been studied before in infants, the other correlates of post-vocalic voicing investigated here --- preceding F1, consonant duration, and closure voicing intensity --- had not been measured before in infant speech. The study makes empirical contributions regarding the development of the production of [voice] in infants, not just from a surface-level perspective but also with implications for the phonetics-phonology interface in the adult and developing linguistic systems. Additionally, several methodological contributions will be made in the use of large sized corpora and data modeling techniques. The study revealed that even in infants, F1 at the midpoint of a vowel preceding a voiced consonant was lower by roughly 50 Hz compared to a vowel before a voiceless consonant, which is in line with the effect found in adults. But while the effect has been considered most likely to be a physiological and nonlinguistic phenomenon in adults, it actually appeared to be correlated in the wrong direction with other aspects of [voice] here, casting doubt on a physiological explanation. Some of the consonant pairs had statistically significant differences in duration and closure voicing. Additionally, a preceding vowel duration difference was found and as well a preliminary indication of a developmental trend that suggests the preceding vowel duration difference is being learned. The phonetics of adult speech is also considered. Results are presented from a dialectal corpus study of North American English and a lab speech experiment which clarifies the relationship between preceding vowel duration and flapping and the relationship between [voice] and F1 in preceding vowels. Fluent adult speech is also described and machine learning algorithms are applied to learning the [voice] distinction using multidimensional acoustic input plus some lexical knowledge