Word-Initial Geminates in Sardinian

It is reported to be uncommon for a language to display phonological contrasts between simplex and geminate obstruents: Italian and Japanese are among the few that do (Tsujimura 2007; Davis 2011). It is even less common for languages to display a phonological contrast of this kind in word-initial position. In this contribution, Sardinian is shown to be one such language. Word-initial geminates are identified through a range of diagnostics and are given an analysis in terms of the CVCV Theory (Lowenstamm 1996; Scheer 2004)

Auditory Disruption Improves Word Segmentation: A Functional Basis for Lenition Phenomena

This paper presents evidence that spirantization, a cross-linguistically common lenition process, affects English listeners’ ease of segmenting novel “words” in an artificial language. The cross-linguistically common spirantization pattern of initial stops and medial continuants (e.g. [ɡuβa]) results in improved word segmentation compared to the inverse “anti-lenition” pattern of initial continuants and medial stops (e.g. [ɣuba]). The study also tests the effect of obstruent voicing, another common lenition pattern, but finds no significant differences in segmentation performance. There are several points of broader interest in these studies. Most of the phonetic factors influencing word segmentation in past studies have been language-specific and/or prosodic in nature: stress, intonation, final lengthening, etc. Spirantization, while often prosodically conditioned, is different from all of these patterns in that it concerns a segmental alternation. Moreover, the effects reported here are for speakers of a language, American English, that only sporadically displays spirantization, and not in the phonological contexts used in the experiment. This suggests that the results may reflect more general properties of speech perception and word boundary detection, rather than a perceptual processing strategy transferred directly from English. As such, the studies offer partial support for theories of lenition rooted in notions of perceptual-acoustic continuity and disruption

Auditory Disruption Improves Word Segmentation: A Functional Basis for Lenition Phenomena

This paper presents evidence that spirantization, a cross-linguistically common lenition process, affects English listeners’ ease of segmenting novel “words” in an artificial language. The cross-linguistically common spirantization pattern of initial stops and medial continuants (e.g. [ɡuβa]) results in improved word segmentation compared to the inverse “anti-lenition” pattern of initial continuants and medial stops (e.g. [ɣuba]). The study also tests the effect of obstruent voicing, another common lenition pattern, but finds no significant differences in segmentation performance. There are several points of broader interest in these studies. Most of the phonetic factors influencing word segmentation in past studies have been language-specific and/or prosodic in nature: stress, intonation, final lengthening, etc. Spirantization, while often prosodically conditioned, is different from all of these patterns in that it concerns a segmental alternation. Moreover, the effects reported here are for speakers of a language, American English, that only sporadically displays spirantization, and not in the phonological contexts used in the experiment. This suggests that the results may reflect more general properties of speech perception and word boundary detection, rather than a perceptual processing strategy transferred directly from English. As such, the studies offer partial support for theories of lenition rooted in notions of perceptual-acoustic continuity and disruption

Intervocalic lenition, contrastiveness and neutralization in Catalan

Copyright (c) 2022 Jose Ignacio Hualde, Jennifer ZhangIn this study we examine the effects of word boundaries on the lenition of intervocalic voiceless plosives in Catalan in order to test the role of phonological contrastiveness in phonetic processes. Here we test the hypothesis that word-final intervocalic voiceless plosives (VC#V) will show greater lenition than word-internal and word-initial intervocalic tokens (VCV, V#CV), since in word-final position the contrast between /ptk/ and /bdg/ is neutralized. Lenition should be manifested acoustically as greater intensity, shorter duration and greater voicing. We find weaker support for the hypothesis than in a parallel study on Basque, suggesting the existence of phonological differences between the two languages. On the other hand, we find a strong effect of style on intervocalic lenition, with conversational speech promoting more lenited consonants. Intervocalic stop lenition in Catalan does not appear to be driven by temporal reduction

Syllable structure and gemination in Maltese

Little is known on the phonetics and the phonotactic constraints of Maltese. This dissertation sheds light on aspects of syllable structure and geminates in Maltese in order to contribute to understanding how the sound system of the language is structured. The study begins by describing the possible syllable structures in Maltese, carefully defining the onsets, nuclei and codas attested in its syllables. Furthermore, the syllabification processes employed in Maltese are discussed. The dissertation then moves on to its primary focus: geminates in Maltese. In relation to syllable structure, geminates in word-medial position are considered to be ambisyllabic, however, the syllable affiliation of word-initial and word-final geminates is under scrutiny. In addition to word-medial geminates, Maltese also has word-initial and word-final geminates. Previous descriptions of Maltese word-initial geminates (e.g, Azzopardi 1981) have claimed that such geminates are preceded by the epenthetic vowel [ɪ]. Based on a series of production studies, I provide acoustic evidence to examine the articulation of word-initial geminates, and show that this epenthesis occurs almost always when the preceding word ends in a consonant. However, when the preceding word ends in a vowel, there are a number of strategies which speakers employ. Subsequently, in a perception experiment, I show that native speakers of Maltese are insensitive to true word-initial geminates (#ss); results indicate that native speaking Maltese listeners could not discriminate between true word-initial geminates (#ss) and word-initial singletons (#s). However, they were able to discriminate between word-initial geminates that were preceded by the epenthetic vowel (#ɪss) and word-initial singletons (#s). Therefore, I argue that this vowel is part of the phonological representation of word-initial geminates, and I discuss implication of these results for lexical access. In addition, I compare word-initial and word-medial geminates and word-final and word-medial geminates. As expected, the most robust correlate is constriction duration as geminates are always longer than singletons. Other correlates, such as voice onset time, does not serve as a correlate to gemination in Maltese. However, the duration of the vowel before word-medial geminates is shorter than the vowel before word-medial singletons and this can serve as a correlate to gemination in production. Finally, I address the consequences that these results have for phonological representation. Following the current literature on gemination, I propose a moraic representation for geminates in Maltese, regardless of their position in the word

Phonetic and phonological nature of prosodic boundaries: evidence from Modern Greek

Research on prosodic structure, the underlying structure organising the prosodic grouping of spoken utterances, has shown that it consists of hierarchically organised prosodic constituents. The present thesis explores the nature of this constituency, in particular the question of whether prosodic structure is comprised of a given set of qualitatively distinct domains, or of a set of domains of the same type varying only gradiently in "strength", or a possible mixture of both types of relations across prosodic levels. This question is addressed by testing how prosodic constituency (mirrored on boundary strength manipulations) is signalled acoustically via pre- and post-boundary durations, intonation contours, and two sandhi processes, namely vowel hiatus resolution and post-nasal stop voicing in Modern Greek. Results show that the phonetic signalling of boundary strength provides support for a mixture of both differences of type and strength across prosodic levels, with some levels only differing in terms of their strength. Pre-boundary durations and resolution of vowel hiatus are gradiently affected by boundary strength with shorter to longer durations from lower to higher domains, and less instances of vowel deletion higher in the hierarchy. Post-nasal stop voicing is qualitatively affected by boundary strength with almost all voicing instances occurring in the lowest constituent of the structure in the way a qualitative view of prosodic constituency would predict, and in line with research on prosodic phonology. Finally, both the alignment and scaling of intonation contours at the edges of domains is found to distinguish qualitatively the lowest domain from the higher ones. All higher phrasal domains align with respect to the boundary and their peak scaling varies consistently gradiently across speakers. When combining those two findings, support is provided for the existence of differences of strength and type within the same process. Taken together the results from these four phenomena support the postulation of an underlying prosodic structure with a limited number of qualitatively distinct domains, within which at the same time some type of recursivity or structured variability must be allowed for. It is shown that there are structural properties of speech, like the length of the utterance, influencing the organisation of utterances in a principled gradient manner, supporting the existence of differences of strength within domain types. These findings bear significance for theories of prosodic structure that have assumed either the view of solely qualitative differences, or sole boundary strength differences, as well as for future proposals on prosodic constituency. Finally, the use of Modern Greek in this thesis adds to the existing literature on a language that has been extensively used by researchers working in views supporting the existence of qualitative distinctions of type across prosodic domains, and provides the first in depth experimental analysis of post-nasal stop voicing

Developments of the lateral in Occitan dialects and their Romance and cross-linguistic context

This thesis analyses sound changes that affected the lateral approximant inherited from Latin in Occitan dialects, in the Romance languages, and in a number of other languages from around the world. Chapter 1 gives a comprehensive overview of the research carried out on the lateral approximant; it discusses articulation and acoustics as well as abstract representations of the sound. Chapters 2 to 5 are devoted to specific sound changes which occurred in Occitan dialects at different points in time. These developments are systematically compared to similar phenomena in Romance and other languages. In chapter 2, I discuss the vocalisation of the dark lateral in preconsonantal and word-final position as well as intervocalically. It is argued there that Occitan and more generally Romance followed an unexpected pathway towards vocalisation, which cannot be explained by phonetic factors alone. Chapter 3 deals with palatalisation of the lateral in onset clusters. Rather than in articulatory assimilation, I propose that the origin of this sound change is to be sought in the frication which accompanied the obstruent + lateral onset clusters. Rhoticisation of the lateral, and its opposite, lambdacisation of the rhotic, is the topic of chapter 4. In this chapter, I discuss duration factors in these sound changes and present experimental evidence to substantiate the idea that duration plays an important role. Finally, chapter 5 looks at the developments of the Latin geminate lateral in Gascon and other Romance dialects; according to common opinion, the Latin geminate lateral underwent a retroflexion process, and I discuss how this might have been possible from a phonetic point of view

The phonetics of labialized velars in Ancient Greek

This thesis investigates conditioned sound changes of Proto-Indo-European labialized velars *kw, *gw, and *gwh to labials, coronals, and velars in Ancient Greek. Acoustic and perceptual experiments in British English and Western Zapotec provide typological evidence to inform conclusions regarding the phonetic inception of the sound changes. Before back vowels and consonants PIE labialized velars became labials in Ancient Greek. Two competing hypotheses have been proposed for these sound changes: perceptual confusion, in which e.g. *kw developed to /p/ via misperception due to acoustic similarity between the two stops (Ohala, 1989, 1993); and incremental articulatory change, in which e.g. *kw gradually developed to /kp/ and then /p/ (Whatmough, 1937; Garrett & Johnson, 2013). The acoustic studies here found little acoustic or perceptual similarity between /kw/ and /p/ in any vocalic environment, indicating that the latter explanation is more plausible. Before front vowels PIE labialized velars became coronals. Philologists have proposed developmental pathways involving processes of incremental palatalization. This thesis finds evidence for coarticulatory fronting of the velar articulation of labialized velars in front vowel environments, but the effect is language-specific and its auditory prominence depends upon the durational overlap of the primary and secondary articulations. Increased auditory prominence of coarticulatory fronting in mid vowel environments may explain divergent developments of *gwh in Greek to labials before front vowels and to coronals before front mid vowels. Before the back round vowel /u/ the PIE labialized velars lost contrastive labialization in Greek. The acoustic and perceptual experiments support a perceptual reanalysis account, in which contrastive secondary labialization of the velar is reinterpreted as coarticulatory rounding adjacent to a rounded vowel

Study of acoustic cues relevant to the perception of stop-lateral sequences

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 175-185).In phonological analyses of both adult and child language, a *dl constraint has frequently been used as a shorthand to indicate that coronal stops are dispreferred before laterals (Dinnsen et al. 2001). This dispreference has frequently been attributed to the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), which prohibits sequences of adjacent identical elements (McCarthy 1979). However, this type of analysis misses the generalization that what languages really seem to lack is the contrast between TL-KL (Flemming 2002). The neutralization of TL-KL contrasts is argued to occur because acoustic cues for coronal and velar stop place are insufficiently distinct in prelateral contexts (Flemming 2002, 2007; Bradley 2006). In this dissertation I address the question of which perceptual dimensions are indistinct for surface contrasts of TL-KL. I capture the perceptual indistinctness of TL-KL contrasts by formalizing constraints that penalize stop place contrasts that crucially lack sufficiently distinct cues for place in both their release transitions and their stop burst properties (Flemming 2007), and show how coronal and velar place contrasts are predicted to be maintained in environments in which (1) at least one of the two cues is available (e.g. before vowels/rhotics) or (2) when other contextual cues are available to license the place contrast. As the threshold of distinctiveness for place contrasts that rules out TL-KL contrasts in a language is predicted to rule out any place contrast that is less distinct for the same cues, the formalization of these constraints make testable predictions about place contrasts in languages more generally, some of which are explored in this dissertation. Another puzzle that arises from adopting a contrast-based analysis for the coronal-stop lateral dispreference involves the outcome of TL-KL contrast neutralization. Why, in languages that show a neutralization of the contrast, is the outcome generally a KL sequence (Flemming 2007)? In my dissertation, I argue that the direction of the neutralization of indistinct surface contrasts, such as TL-KL, is conditioned by the avoidance of other indistinct contrasts. In addition to an indistinct pre-lateral stop place contrast (TL-KL), there are indistinct contrasts involving stop presence (TL-L) that play a role in determining the outcome of neutralizations.by Jennifer M. Michaels.Ph.D