How morphological structure affects phonetic realisation in English compound nouns

Many studies have shown that syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects of morphological structure may have an impact on the phonetic realisation of complex words (e.g. Cohen 2014a,b; Kuperman et al. 2007; Lee-Kim et al. 2013; Lõo et al. 2018; Plag et al. 2017; Schuppler et al. 2012; Smith et al. 2012; Sproat and Fujimura 1993; Zimmermann 2016, among many others). The majority of these studies have been concerned with affixes, often focusing on the acoustic properties of segments at a morphological boundary. The present study extends this line of investigation to compounds, exploring the extent to which consonant duration at compound-internal boundaries in English is dependent on morphological structure. Three competing hypotheses about the relationship between fine phonetic detail and morphological structure are tested. According to the Segmentability Hypothesis, greater morphological segmentability, i.e. a stronger morphological boundary, leads to acoustic lengthening (Ben Hedia and Plag 2017; Hay 2003; Plag and Ben Hedia 2018). The Informativity Hypothesis, on the other hand, states that higher informativity leads to lengthening (e.g. Jurafsky et al. 2001; van Son and Pols 2003). Finally, the Paradigmatic Support Hypothesis says that stronger paradigmatic support leads to lengthening (Cohen 2014b; Kuperman et al. 2007). To test these hypotheses, an experimental study was carried out using 62 compound types taken from the British National Corpus. The compounds were spoken by 30 speakers, yielding more than 1500 acoustic tokens overall. The data provide no support for the Segmentability Hypothesis, and only limited support for the Informativity Hypothesis. In contrast, the Paradigmatic Support Hypothesis makes correct predictions: consonant duration at compound-internal boundaries is positively correlated with the probability of the relevant consonant following the first noun, and the duration of compound-internal geminate consonants is negatively correlated with the family size of the first noun. In other words, longer durations are associated with lower paradigmatic diversity

It´s all about the rhythm - A neurocognitive approach towards the Rhythm Rule in German and English

The aim of the present doctoral thesis is to gain deeper insight into the cognitive processing of rhythmically irregular structures in form of stress clashes and stress lapses in comparison to structures that follow the Rhythm Rule. Although stress clashes and stress lapses are allowed and hence present in speech, they are nonetheless marked as rhythmically ill-formed. Hence, since rhythmically induced stress shifts appear often in languages like German, and especially English, it was decided to investigate how the brain reacts to structures that do not meet with rhythmic expectations but are allowed in the investigated language. In this respect, this rhythmic phenomenon differs from the rhythmic deviation types that have been investigated to date. Four studies comprising five experiments using the ERP technique were conducted within the scope of the present thesis. In order to support and complement the findings of the ERP studies, an additional production and perception study and two reaction time studies were designed and undertaken on German rhythmic irregularities. Three ERP studies were conducted on the cognitive processing of rhythmic irregularities in German phrases and compounds. Due to the given task settings in the ERP studies, measured reaction times were not meaningful. Therefore, independent reaction time studies with the identical set of stimuli were performed and are reported with the corresponding ERP studies. Based on the findings of the first ERP experiment on German phrases, a follow-up study was conducted in which the sensitivity towards attentional and contextual influences was further tested by using modified task settings and adjusted stimuli presentation modalities. The study on German compounds consists of two experiments which tried to shed further light on the task-sensitivity of the ERP components found in the studies on German phrases. A further ERP study was set up in order to compare the influence of the RR on processing in German and English by using similar deviations in English. Therefore, English compounds were tested either obeying or deviating from this rule. Moreover, due to the aforementioned syntactic differences between stress shift targets in German and English, this study allowed for a combined yet disentangled investigation of rhythmical and lexical influences on speech processing. In previous research, the application of the RR in speech production was mainly investigated on English data and exclusively in compound structures in German. Therefore, an additional production and perception study was used as a pre-test for the planned ERP studies on German. Investigating the application and perception of the RR should deliver further insights into its importance in German not only on the word level (in compounds) but also on the phrasal level and therefore complement and extend the findings of previous studies

Elements, Government, and Licensing: Developments in phonology

Elements, Government, and Licensing brings together new theoretical and empirical developments in phonology. It covers three principal domains of phonological representation: melody and segmental structure; tone, prosody and prosodic structure; and phonological relations, empty categories, and vowel-zero alternations. Theoretical topics covered include the formalisation of Element Theory, the hotly debated topic of structural recursion in phonology, and the empirical status of government. In addition, a wealth of new analyses and empirical evidence sheds new light on empty categories in phonology, the analysis of certain consonantal sequences, phonological and non-phonological alternation, the elemental composition of segments, and many more. Taking up long-standing empirical and theoretical issues informed by the Government Phonology and Element Theory, this book provides theoretical advances while also bringing to light new empirical evidence and analysis challenging previous generalisations. The insights offered here will be equally exciting for phonologists working on related issues inside and outside the Principles & Parameters programme, such as researchers working in Optimality Theory or classical rule-based phonology

A Sound Approach to Language Matters: In Honor of Ocke-Schwen Bohn

The contributions in this Festschrift were written by Ocke’s current and former PhD-students, colleagues and research collaborators. The Festschrift is divided into six sections, moving from the smallest building blocks of language, through gradually expanding objects of linguistic inquiry to the highest levels of description - all of which have formed a part of Ocke’s career, in connection with his teaching and/or his academic productions: “Segments”, “Perception of Accent”, “Between Sounds and Graphemes”, “Prosody”, “Morphology and Syntax” and “Second Language Acquisition”. Each one of these illustrates a sound approach to language matters

SpeechMirror: A Multimodal Visual Analytics System for Personalized Reflection of Online Public Speaking Effectiveness

As communications are increasingly taking place virtually, the ability to present well online is becoming an indispensable skill. Online speakers are facing unique challenges in engaging with remote audiences. However, there has been a lack of evidence-based analytical systems for people to comprehensively evaluate online speeches and further discover possibilities for improvement. This paper introduces SpeechMirror, a visual analytics system facilitating reflection on a speech based on insights from a collection of online speeches. The system estimates the impact of different speech techniques on effectiveness and applies them to a speech to give users awareness of the performance of speech techniques. A similarity recommendation approach based on speech factors or script content supports guided exploration to expand knowledge of presentation evidence and accelerate the discovery of speech delivery possibilities. SpeechMirror provides intuitive visualizations and interactions for users to understand speech factors. Among them, SpeechTwin, a novel multimodal visual summary of speech, supports rapid understanding of critical speech factors and comparison of different speech samples, and SpeechPlayer augments the speech video by integrating visualization of the speaker's body language with interaction, for focused analysis. The system utilizes visualizations suited to the distinct nature of different speech factors for user comprehension. The proposed system and visualization techniques were evaluated with domain experts and amateurs, demonstrating usability for users with low visualization literacy and its efficacy in assisting users to develop insights for potential improvement.Comment: Main paper (11 pages, 6 figures) and Supplemental document (11 pages, 11 figures). Accepted by VIS 202

Exploring Cross-linguistic Effects and Phonetic Interactions in the Context of Bilingualism

This Special Issue includes fifteen original state-of-the-art research articles from leading scholars that examine cross-linguistic influence in bilingual speech. These experimental studies contribute to the growing number of studies on multilingual phonetics and phonology by introducing novel empirical data collection techniques, sophisticated methodologies, and acoustic analyses, while also presenting findings that provide robust theoretical implications to a variety of subfields, such as L2 acquisition, L3 acquisition, laboratory phonology, acoustic phonetics, psycholinguistics, sociophonetics, blingualism, and language contact. These studies in this book further elucidate the nature of phonetic interactions in the context of bilingualism and multilingualism and outline future directions in multilingual phonetics and phonology research

Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications

The International Workshop on Models and Analysis of Vocal Emissions for Biomedical Applications (MAVEBA) came into being in 1999 from the particularly felt need of sharing know-how, objectives and results between areas that until then seemed quite distinct such as bioengineering, medicine and singing. MAVEBA deals with all aspects concerning the study of the human voice with applications ranging from the neonate to the adult and elderly. Over the years the initial issues have grown and spread also in other aspects of research such as occupational voice disorders, neurology, rehabilitation, image and video analysis. MAVEBA takes place every two years always in Firenze, Italy. This edition celebrates twenty years of uninterrupted and succesfully research in the field of voice analysis

Data Hiding and Its Applications

Data hiding techniques have been widely used to provide copyright protection, data integrity, covert communication, non-repudiation, and authentication, among other applications. In the context of the increased dissemination and distribution of multimedia content over the internet, data hiding methods, such as digital watermarking and steganography, are becoming increasingly relevant in providing multimedia security. The goal of this book is to focus on the improvement of data hiding algorithms and their different applications (both traditional and emerging), bringing together researchers and practitioners from different research fields, including data hiding, signal processing, cryptography, and information theory, among others

Computational investigations of derivational morphology

The notion that it is difficult to make predictions about derivational morphology has been a recurring theme in morphological research over the last decades. It can be unclear whether a derivative exists at all, what a derivative means exactly, and which affix is used to form a derivative. The central goal of this thesis is to demonstrate that recent progress in natural language processing (NLP) allows for a fresh view on the (un-)predictability of derivational morphology. Prior research in morphology has recognized semantic and extralinguistic factors as two key challenges for successfully predicting derivational morphology. The first set of papers contained in the thesis leverages novel methods from NLP and applies them to large-scale, socially-stratified datasets. I find that this computational approach results in substantially improved models, demonstrating that derivational morphology is predictable to a larger extent than previously thought. A side result of the first part of the thesis is that tokenization (i.e., the way in which words are segmented) affects the capability of NLP systems to predict derivational morphology, raising the question whether it deteriorates performance on a larger scale. The second set of papers contained in the thesis shows that this is indeed the case. As a remedy, I devise tokenization strategies that are directly informed by morphology, with beneficial effects on performance. On a wider scale, the results of this thesis suggest that NLP and deep learning more generally can greatly benefit linguistic research, a view that is still contested by many scholars in linguistics. At the same time, the thesis shows that even, or perhaps especially, in the age of large language models, linguistic insights continue to be relevant for the development of human language technology