The Effect of Focus on Creaky Phonation in Mandarin Chinese Tones

Previous studies of the prosodic realization of focus in Mandarin Chinese show an expansion of the pitch range of lexical tones. It is less clear, however, whether focus affects the Creaky Phonation (CP) that often co-occurs with the Dipping third tone (T3), and to some extent, also with the Falling fourth tone (T4). This study investigates the effect of focus on the acoustic properties of the four Mandarin tones, and while it confirms the expansion of the pitch range under focus, it does not find that focus affects CP in T3; it only finds an effect of focus on CP in T4. Both the F0 and CP patterns are also considered in relation to the Functional Load Hypothesis, specifically, the relationship between the contrastive properties of a language and the manifestation of prominence

Emotion perception in pre-kindergarten school children at Central Institute for the Deaf

This paper studies the ability of pre-kindergarten students with both normal hearing and impaired hearing to identify emotions in speech through audition only. In addition, the study assesses whether a listener\u27s familiarity with a speaker\u27s voice has an effect on his/her ability to identify the emotion of the speaker

Emotion perception in speech: Discrimination, identification, and the effects of talker and sentence variability

The primary goal of this project is to study the ability of adult cochlear implant users to perceive emotion through speech alone. A secondary goal of this project is to study the development of emotion perception in normal hearing children to serve as a baseline for comparing emotion perception abilities in similarly-aged children with impaired hearing

Efficient error correction for speech systems using constrained re-recognition

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-75).Efficient error correction of recognition output is a major barrier in the adoption of speech interfaces. This thesis addresses this problem through a novel correction framework and user interface. The system uses constraints provided by the user to enhance re-recognition, correcting errors with minimal user effort and time. In our web interface, users listen to the recognized utterance, marking incorrect words as they hear them. After they have finished marking errors, they submit the edits back to the speech recognizer where it is merged with previous edits and then converted into a finite state transducer. This FST, modeling the regions of correct and incorrect words in the recognition output, is then composed with the recognizer's language model and the utterance is re-recognized. We explored the use of our error correction technique in both the lecture and restaurant domain, evaluating the types of errors and the correction performance in each domain. With our system, we have found significant improvements over other error correction techniques such as n-best lists, re-speaking or verbal corrections, and retyping in terms of actions per correction step, corrected output rate, and ease of use.by Gregory T. Yu.M.Eng

Phonological Prominence and Its Interaction with Tone in Chinese Dialects

Earlier studies on Chinese have recognized that there are prominent positions, and there are interactions between tone and prominent positions. However, the earlier studies have not rigorously applied phonetic or phonological inspections for establishing prominent positions in Chinese. When more rigorous phonetic and phonological examinations have been applied in this study, a more constrained and principled set of prominence phenomena emerged. This set excludes the postulation of a generalized trochaic system in Standard Mandarin, accentual prominence in New Chongming and peripheral prominence in Zhenhai. On the other hand, this set includes metrical prominence in the Northern Wu dialects and Fengkai Cantonese, and the interaction between tone and metrically prominent positions. In this study, two types of interaction between metrical prominence and tone are attested. First, metrically strong positions are characterized by the preservation of lexical tones, or the ability to determine the shape of the neighboring tones. Thus, the stressed position normally licenses a larger range of tonal contrast. Unstressed syllables tend to go tonal modification, reduction, or loss. Second, tone can condition stress placement. Observations made in the Northern Wu dialects suggest that stress assignment is sensitive to tone properties. In the Northern Wu group, the distribution of stress tends to avoid syllables with a low tone, or a short tone. To summarize, although Chinese is widely recognized as a canonical tone language, stress and tone as two independent phonological properties do co-exist in Chinese. The co-existence of tone and stress leads to some interesting interactions. However, tone-stress interaction in Chinese produces a limited set of phonological processes, which is only attested in a limited number of dialects

Feature specifications and contrast in vowel harmony: the orthography and phonology of Old Norwegian height harmony

In this thesis, I provide a new approach to the role of phonological patterning in determining the featural content of phonological relations and the size and shape of sound inventories. The empirical scope of this project has particular focus on vowel harmony and vocalic features with an extended case study of Old Norwegian. Vowel harmony, simply defined, is a process where vowels in a word show systematic correspondence for some feature. Because of its many moving parts and obvious class behaviour, vowel harmony and harmony languages provide one of the best laboratories for exploring the emergence, acquisition, specification, and common patterning of phonological features. In chapter 1 I provide an introduction to Old Norwegian vowel harmony and some unexplained harmony exceptions. This chapter explores parallel phenomena in the typology of harmony languages and the theoretical challenges these patterns pose. In particular, I illustrate that non-harmonising segments display three distinct behaviours with respect to phonological activity and visibility while the core components of popular grammatical and representational approaches to vowel harmony commonly only predict two. I suggest the solution to this problem lies in the representation and definition of phonological contrastivity. Chapter 2 presents the principal components of a new approach to the acquisition and specification of features using a version of Contrastive Hierarchy Theory (Dresher, Piggott & Rice 1994; D. C. Hall 2007; Dresher 2003, 2009) which incorporates emergent and substance-free features and feature-nodes (Iosad 2017a). In this chapter I argue that phonological features, segments, feature classes, and whole sound inventories emerge according to the Correlate Contrastivist Hypothesis which holds that a language’s phonemic inventory is defined by the set of active phonological features required to express the language’s phonological regularities. Drawing insights from Westergaard’s (2009, 2013, 2014) model of micro-cues, I posit that language learners generalise small pieces of abstract linguistic structures (‘micro-cues’) in the form of features and feature co-occurrence restrictions while parsing linguistic input. In the course of language acquisition, these micro-cues accumulate, and the sum of these cues defines a sound inventory. I argue a segment’s feature specifications and the shape of feature classes in a language are determined by a version of the Successive Division Algorithm (Dresher 2009, §7.8; D. C. Hall 2007, §1.2.7; Mackenzie 2013, 2016) which takes an ordered set of representational micro-cues as its input and returns a contrastively specified segment inventory as its output. Finally, this chapter demonstrates how these components combined with the hierarchical organisation of features afforded by the contrastive hierarchy architecture recapitulates all the important insights of feature geometry, providing an economical and principled model of phonological representations which narrowly vary cross-linguistically. In chapter 3 I present a formal model of harmony using a licensing approach, adapted from Iosad (2017a) and Walker (2005), inspired by the recipient-oriented model of Nevins (2010). Using a detailed study of cross-dialectal microvariation in harmony and harmony neutrality in Yoruba (Atlantic-Congo), I demonstrate that this framework makes the right predictions, affording a ternary contrast in the behaviour of non-alternating harmony segments without any necessary additional grammatical mechanisms. A principal assumption of Contrastive Hierarchy Theory is that the hierarchical scope of features is cross-linguistically variable, and this chapter illustrates how variable feature ordering predicts common asymmetries across harmony languages in the presence or absence of required agreement for orthogonal features (so-called ‘parasitic harmony’). Specifically, the contrastive hierarchy derives parasitic harmony languages by nesting harmony feature contrasts within other featural divisions. This chapter closes with an exploration of the predicted typology of non-/parasitic systems and provides explicit diagnostics for identifying true vs. false parasitic harmony. The theoretical chapters present a coherent, limited, and highly predictive model of phonological representations and vowel harmony, but the real value of a theory is whether it can provide new insights on questions which have otherwise resisted explanation. Old Norwegian vowels and vowel harmony represent such an example. Old Norwegian vowel harmony displays remarkably complex patterns, and its analysis is considerably complicated by the philological nature of available evidence. Chapter 4 presents the materials and methods I employ for the automated collection and phonological annotation of Old Norwegian vowel sequences in a corpus of mid-to-late 13th-century manuscripts. The corpus study’s data set is freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/ gj6n-js33. Chapter 5 provides a grapho-phonological study of the Old Norwegian vowel inventory and segmental phonological patterns. This corpus study shows that Old Norwegian manuscripts display robust (pre-decay), transitional, and decayed vowel harmony, which provides invaluable empirical evidence for the otherwise poorly documented decay of harmony systems. The rest of the chapter provides a detailed survey of pre-decay Old Norwegian surface harmony patterns and their interaction with other sound processes and sound changes (e.g. umlauts, vowel deletions, and vowel mergers). A major goal of this project has been to develop tangible heuristics for the reconstruction of historical phonological representations on the basis of phonological patterns evidenced in textual source material. Tying together this thesis’ theoretical and empirical components, I show in chapter 6 how the active vocalic features and feature co-occurrence restrictions in Old Norwegian can be discerned according to the Correlate Contrastivist Hypothesis. In turn, the intricate harmony and neutral harmony patterns in Old Norwegian receive a straightforward explanation following these representational generalisations. This case study illustrates how even complex harmony systems such as Old Norwegian can be reduced to simple emergent effects of the categorisation and co-occurrence of features in contrastive feature hierarchies. This chapter concludes with a historical phonological investigation of the implications of this harmony system for the status of other Old Norwegian sound patterns. The main features of this thesis’ theoretical component and useful abstract schemata are provided in chapter 7 to aid in applying this framework to new data. For ease of comparison, I provide an appendix with contrastive hierarchies and summaries of each harmony language cited in this thesis. The unique contribution of Old Norwegian neutral harmony patterns within the typology of vowel harmony languages provides important evidence for the role of feature specifications and contrastivity in phonology. This thesis’ broad typological and narrow empirical studies confirm the descriptive and explanatory adequacy of the proposed framework in providing novel insights on new and old problems regarding the link between phonological representations and phonological patterns

Making accurate formant measurements: an empirical investigation of the influence of the measurement tool, analysis settings and speaker on formant measurements

The aim of this thesis is to provide guidance and information that will assist forensic speech scientists, and phoneticians generally, in making more accurate formant measurements, using commonly available speech analysis tools. Formant measurements are an important speech feature that are often examined in forensic casework, and are used widely in many other areas within the field of phonetics. However, the performance of software currently used by analysts has not been subject to detailed investigation. This thesis reports on a series of experiments that examine the influence that the analysis tools, analysis settings and speakers have on formant measurements. The influence of these three factors was assessed by examining formant measurement errors and their behaviour. This was done using both synthetic and real speech. The synthetic speech was generated with known formant values so that the measurement errors could be calculated precisely. To investigate the influence of different speakers on measurement performance, synthetic speakers were created with different third formant structures and with different glottal source signals. These speakers’ synthetic vowels were analysed using Praat’s normal formant measuring tool across a range of LPC orders. The real speech was from a subset of 186 speakers from the TIMIT corpus. The measurements from these speakers were compared with a set of hand-corrected reference formant values to establish the performance of four measurement tools across a range of analysis parameters and measurement strategies. The analysis of the measurement errors explored the relationships between the analysis tools, the analysis parameters and the speakers, and also examined how the errors varied over the vowel space. LPC order was found to have the greatest influence on the magnitude of the errors and their overall behaviour was closely associated with the underlying measurement process used by the tools. The performance of the formant trackers tended to be better than the simple Praat measuring tool, and allowing the LPC order to vary across tokens improved the performance for all tools. The performance was found to differ across speakers, and for each real speaker, the best performance was obtained when the measurements were made with a range of LPC orders, rather than being restricted to just one. The most significant guidance that arises from the results is that analysts should have an understanding of the basis of LPC analysis and know how it is applied to obtain formant measurements in the software that they use. They should also understand the influence of LPC order and the other analysis parameters concerning formant tracking. This will enable them to select the most appropriate settings and avoid making unreliable measurements