Towards a typology of stop assibilation

In this article we propose that there are two universal properties for phonological stop assibilations, namely (i) assibilations cannot be triggered by /i/ unless they are also triggered by /j/, and (ii) voiced stops cannot undergo assibilations unless voiceless ones do. The article presents typological evidence from assibilations in 45 languages supporting both (i) and (ii). It is argued that assibilations are to be captured in the Optimality Theoretic framework by ranking markedness constraints grounded in perception which penalize sequences like [ti] ahead of a faith constraint which militates against the change from /t/ to some sibilant sound. The occurring language types predicted by (i) and (ii) will be shown to involve permutations of the rankings between several different markedness constraints and the one faith constraint. The article demonstrates that there exist several logically possible assibilation types which are ruled out because they would involve illicit rankings

Palatalization in Romanian — Acoustic properties and perception

This paper presents the results of an acoustic study of fricatives from four places of articulation produced by 31 native speakers of Romanian, as well as those of a perceptual study using the stimuli from the acoustic experiment, allowing for a direct comparison between acoustic properties and perception. It was found that there are greater acoustic differences between plain and palatalized labials and dorsals as compared to coronals. The acoustic results were paralleled by the perceptual findings. This pattern departs from cross-linguistic generalizations made with respect to the properties of secondary palatalization. A likely source of the differences is the fact that previous studies of secondary palatalization typically involved stops which tend to exhibit various enhancement phenomena at the coronal place of articulation. Since the enhancement generally involves additional frication, this is not a useful strategy for fricatives at the coronal, or any other place of articulation. These findings form the basis of a discussion highlighting the differences between enhanced and non-enhanced secondary palatalization

Loan Phonology

For many different reasons, speakers borrow words from other languages to fill gaps in their own lexical inventory. The past ten years have been characterized by a great interest among phonologists in the issue of how the nativization of loanwords occurs. The general feeling is that loanword nativization provides a direct window for observing how acoustic cues are categorized in terms of the distinctive features relevant to the L1 phonological system as well as for studying L1 phonological processes in action and thus to the true synchronic phonology of L1. The collection of essays presented in this volume provides an overview of the complex issues phonologists face when investigating this phenomenon and, more generally, the ways in which unfamiliar sounds and sound sequences are adapted to converge with the native language’s sound pattern. This book is of interest to theoretical phonologists as well as to linguists interested in language contact phenomena

Speech Recognition

Chapters in the first part of the book cover all the essential speech processing techniques for building robust, automatic speech recognition systems: the representation for speech signals and the methods for speech-features extraction, acoustic and language modeling, efficient algorithms for searching the hypothesis space, and multimodal approaches to speech recognition. The last part of the book is devoted to other speech processing applications that can use the information from automatic speech recognition for speaker identification and tracking, for prosody modeling in emotion-detection systems and in other speech processing applications that are able to operate in real-world environments, like mobile communication services and smart homes

Консолидација страндардизације ромског језика - прошлост, садашњост, будућност уз поштовање дијалекатског диверзитета и омогућавање једноставне комуникације на матерњом језику широм света

The paper begins with the consideration of the circumstances in which Romani language is currently being developed, compared to the main languages in Europe. Furthermore, the paper deals with different stereotypes and explains the Romani dialectal structure not only from the aspect of heritage and as a mother tongue, but in the light of the measurement of inter-dialectal involvement proven by mathematical methods. This process leads to a clear clarification of the term ’dialect’. The natural occurrence of concepts of common, standard, literary, national, etc. in language is explained (according to different schools) as well as the present situation of the Romani language, with a focus on the prospects of its further development (the principle of butterfly) in the social context: the role of parents, family, church, society, school, media and various institutions in codification and normalization – also from the aspect of developing brakes. Some didactic tools are presented as instruments that also contribute to a better understanding of codification and normalization among Roma, leading to the harmonization of different dialects in the spirit of mutual respect for diversity. Such endeavors, however, are useless if they are not understood by users and if they are not really rooted in their culture. The above elements lead to the problem of direct codification and its connection with communication, in particular modern communication on social networks and multiple academic levels – because its ultimate purpose is to provide the Roma with a widespread modern language, with the ability to express all the nuances of human thinking. The paper ends with examples of some good practices in Romania and the former Yugoslavia – bearing in mind that negating or destroying one language is only one element in a wider mechanism of ethnic prejudice against the people speaking it.Прилог почиње разматрањем околности у којима се тренутно развија ромски језик, у поређењу са главним језицима у Европи. Даље се бави различитим стереотипима и објашњава ромску дијалектолошку структуру не само са аспекта баштине и као матерњег језика, већ и у светлу мерења међудијалекатске удaљености, доказане математичким методама. Тај процес води до јасног разјашњавања појма ‘дијалекат’. Објашњава се природно појављивање појмова заједничког, стандардног, књижевног, националног итд. језика (према различитим школама) као и данашња ситуација ромског језика, са фокусом на перспективе његовог даљег развоја (’принцип лептира’) у друштвеном контексту: улога родитеља, породице, цркве, друштва, школе, медија и разних институција у кодификацији и нормализацији – такође са аспекта кочница у развоју. Неки дидактички алати су представљени као инструменти који такође доприносе бољем разумевању кодификације и нормализације међу Ромима, што води до хармонизације различитих наречја у духу међусобног поштовања различитости. Такви су подухвати ипак бескорисни ако их не разумеју корисници и ако нису стварно укорењени у њиховој култури. Наведени елементи доводе до проблема директне кодификације и њених веза са комуникацијом, нарочито модерном комуникацијом на друштвеним мрежама и разним академским нивоима – зато што је њена крајња сврха да Ромима пружи широко распрострањен модеран језик способан да изрази све нијансе људског мишљења. Презентација се завршава примерима неких добрих пракси у Румунији и бившој Југославији – имајући у виду да је негирање или уништавање једног језика само један елемент у ширем механизму етничких предрасуда против народа који датим језиком говори.Научни скупови ; том 175 / Српска академија наука и уметности. Одељење друштвених наука ; књ. 4

RSS-TOBI - a Prosodically Enhanced Romanian Speech Corpus

This paper introduces a recent development of a Romanian Speech corpus to include prosodic annotations of the speech data in the form of ToBI labels. We describe the methodology of determining the required pitch patterns that are common for the Romanian language, annotate the speech resource, and then provide a comparison of two text-to-speech synthesis systems to establish the benefits of using this type of information to our speech resource. The result is a publicly available speech dataset which can be used to further develop speech synthesis systems or to automatically learn the prediction of ToBI labels from text in Romanian language

Lexical and postlexical prominence in Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic

Tashlhiyt Berber (Afro-Asiatic, Berber) and Moroccan Arabic (Afro-Asiatic, Semitic), two languages spoken in Morocco, have been in contact for over 1200 years. The influence of Berber languages on the lexicon and the segmental-phonological structure of Moroccan Arabic is well-documented, whereas possible similarities in the prosodic-phonological domain have not yet been addressed in detail. This thesis brings together evidence from production and perception to bear on the question whether Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic also exhibit convergence in the domain of phonological prominence. Experimental results are interpreted as showing that neither language has lexical prominence asymmetries in the form of lexical stress. This lack of stress in Moroccan Arabic is unlike the undisputed presence of lexical stress in most other varieties of Arabic, which in turn suggests that this aspect of the phonology of Moroccan Arabic has resulted from contact with (Tashlhiyt) Berber. A further, theoretical contribution is made with respect to the possible correspondence between lexical and postlexical prominence structure from a typological point of view. One of the tenets of the Autosegmental Metrical approach to intonation analysis holds that prominence-marking intonational events (pitch accents) associate with lexically stressed syllables. Exactly how prominence marking is achieved in languages that lack lexical stress is little-understood, and this thesis' discussion of postlexical prominence in Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic provides new insights that bear on this topic. A first set of production experiments investigates, for both languages, if there are acoustic correlates to what some researchers have considered to be lexically stressed syllables. It is shown that neither language exhibits consistent acoustic enhancement of presumed stressed syllables relative to unstressed syllables. The second set of production experiments reports on the prosodic characteristics of question word interrogatives in both languages. It is shown that question words are the locus of postlexical prominence-marking events that however do not exhibit association to a sub-lexical phonological unit. A final perception experiment serves the goal of showing how native speakers of Tashlhiyt Berber and Moroccan Arabic deal with the encoding of a postlexical prominence contrast that is parasitic on a lexical prominence contrast. This is achieved by means of a 'stress deafness' experiment, the results of which show that speakers of neither language can reliably encode a lexically-specified prominence difference. Results from all three types of experiment thus converge in suggesting that lexical prominence asymmetries are not specified in the phonology of either language