Using audio stimuli in acceptability judgment experiments

In this paper, we argue that moving away from written stimuli in acceptability judgment experiments is necessary to address the systematic exclusion of particular empirical phenomena, languages/varieties, and speakers in psycholinguistics. We provide user‐friendly guidelines for conducting acceptability experiments which use audio stimuli in three platforms: Praat, Qualtrics, and PennController for Ibex. In supplementary materials, we include data and R script from a sample experiment investigating English constituent order using written and audio stimuli. This paper aims not only to increase the types of languages, speakers, and phenomena which are included in experimental syntax, but also to help researchers who are interested in conducting experiments to overcome the initial learning curve. Video Abstract link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoWYY1O9ugsPeer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156434/2/lnc312377_am.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/156434/1/lnc312377.pd

Chinese compounds : the role of morphosyntactic structure in stress assignment in Shanghai chinese and tone sandhi in mandarin chinese

At the interface of morphosyntax and phonology, some phonological behaviors in Chinese languages are sensitive to word domain (stress assignment/stress resolution and tone sandhi). In this thesis, we focus on how morphosyntactic structures can contribute to some phonological behaviors that remain to be puzzles in the Chinese languages. Additionally, a highly-functional morphosyntax-based framework is shown to be realistic to construct a simplified and consistent model in domain construction of T3 tone sandhi in Chinese Mandarin, which has been considered challenging in the literature. Following “Little x heads” theory (Marantz 1995; Marantz 2001) and syntactic incorporated compounding structures (Harley 2009), we use a syntactic multiple-root incorporated structure for Chinese compounding structures to account for the stress assignment and stress resolution (stress clash avoidance) in Shanghai Chinese with revised Phase Impenetrability for Phonology (rPIP) (Embick 2013). Meanwhile, a tentative Concatenation rule (Pak 2008; Chen 2018) after Linearization of Morphological words is proposed to account for the domain construction in T3 tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese, which refers to specific morphosyntactic information (morphosyntactic locality characteristics and c-command relations). Different from the literature, we add the syntactic multiple-root incorporated structure of Chinese compounding structures into the algorithm of Concatenation rule. This is proved to be essential to successfully construct a unified framework of T3 tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese both above and below the classical word domain, showing a noteworthy ability to deal with the exceptional situations in Chen (2009), e.g., syntactic words, phonological words and complex predicates. This project supports that morphosyntax-based analysis under syntactic word formation, e.g., Concatenation rules in Distributed Morphology, is a powerful weapon to reveal the processing logic of some controversial phonological rules vaguely floating between the classical lexical and postlexical rules in the literature, e.g., sandhi behaviours. Under the current framework, differently from multimorphemic structures, the monomorphemic structures seem to be opaque in the application process of specific non-cyclic phonological rules. Such opaque monomorphemic structures can be postulated to be a product or outcome of certain phonological rules’ processing economy and efficiency, instead of a true grammatical identity

The Prosodic System of Southern Bobo Madare

This dissertation describes the word-level and phrase-level prosodic system of Southern Bobo Madare (Bobo), a Mande language of Burkina Faso. I examine tonal aspects of Bobo’s prosodic system and provide an extensive phonetic description of the use of non-modal phonation and final lengthening to mark utterance type. The data examined include both elicitation tasks and spontaneous speech tasks. The work is conducted within the framework of autosegmental-metrical theory (Pierrehumbert 1980). Several aspects of the word-level prosodic system are discussed. Previous work on Bobo (Morse, 1976; Le Bris & Prost, 1981; Sanou, 1993) disagree on the inventory of contour tones and the existence of word stress. I present an analysis in support of three contour tones: High-Low, Low-High, and Low-Mid. I do not find clear phonetic evidence of word stress. Phonological analysis supports the existence of stress however: The distribution of reduced vowels supports the existence of iambic prosodic feet, which is common in Mande languages. Furthermore, the distribution of tone melodies is best explained by assuming that tone melodies are assigned to the foot rather than to the word or morpheme, similar to Leben’s (2001) proposal for tonal feet in Bamana. While both word-level and phrase-level prosody are discussed, most attention is given to phrase-level prosodic phenomena. In recent years, there has been increased interest in the phrase-level prosody of African tone languages (Downing & Rialland, 2016). However, detailed descriptions of the phrase-level prosody of Mande languages still remain extremely rare. This is the first such description of a Mande language with three tone levels. Bobo makes relatively little use of intonational tones. Declarative statements are marked only through final lengthening and in some cases non-modal vowel phonation. Polar questions show some characteristics of the areal “lax question prosody” described by Rialland (2009): L% boundary tone, which is concatenated onto the string of lexical tones, extreme lengthening of the phrase-final segment (always a vowel in Bobo), and breathy utterance termination. This L% boundary tone is the only clear case of an intonational tone in Bobo. Wh-questions can (but typically do not) have an L% boundary tone and have a lesser degree of phrase-final lengthening than polar questions. Negated statements do not have special prosodic characteristics. The phrase-level prosodic hierarchy of Bobo is relatively flat, consisting of only the intonational phrase. In addition to investigating the prosodic marking of utterance type, I present an investigation into focus marking in Bobo. I examine the responses to wh-questions and corrections, two contexts in which focus-marking is typically found cross-linguistically. I find no evidence of morphosyntactic or prosodic focus marking in these contexts. Bobo is therefore an additional example of an African tone language without obligatory focus marking in these contexts. The relevance of these results to our current understanding of prosodic typology is discussed throughout.PHDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163107/1/ksher_1.pd

Analyzing Prosody with Legendre Polynomial Coefficients

This investigation demonstrates the effectiveness of Legendre polynomial coefficients representing prosodic contours within the context of two different tasks: nativeness classification and sarcasm detection. By making use of accurate representations of prosodic contours to answer fundamental linguistic questions, we contribute significantly to the body of research focused on analyzing prosody in linguistics as well as modeling prosody for machine learning tasks. Using Legendre polynomial coefficient representations of prosodic contours, we answer prosodic questions about differences in prosody between native English speakers and non-native English speakers whose first language is Mandarin. We also learn more about prosodic qualities of sarcastic speech. We additionally perform machine learning classification for both tasks, (achieving an accuracy of 72.3% for nativeness classification, and achieving 81.57% for sarcasm detection). We recommend that linguists looking to analyze prosodic contours make use of Legendre polynomial coefficients modeling; the accuracy and quality of the resulting prosodic contour representations makes them highly interpretable for linguistic analysis

Testing Low-Frequency Neural Activity in Sentence Understanding

Human language has the unique characteristic where we can create infinite and novel phrases or sentences; this stems from the ability of composition, which allows us to combine smaller units into bigger meaningful units. Composition involves us following syntactic rules stored in memory and building well-formed structures incrementally. Research has shown that neural circuits can be associated with cognitive faculties such as memory and language and there is evidence indicating where and when the neural indices of the processing of composition are. However, it is not yet clear "how" neural circuits actually implement compositional processes. This dissertation aims to probe "how" composition of meaning is represented by neural circuits by investigating the role of low-frequency neural activity in carrying out composition. Neuroelectric signals were recorded with Electroencephalography (EEG) to examine the functional interpretation of low-frequency neural activity in the so-called delta band of 0.5 to 3 Hz. Activities in this band have been associated with the processing of syntactic structures (Ding et al. 2016). First, whether these activities are indeed associated with hierarchy remains under debate. This dissertation uses a novel condition in which the same words are presented, but their order is changed to remove the syntactic structure. Only entrainment with syllables was found in this "reversed" condition, supporting the hypothesis that neural activities in the delta band entrain to abstract syntactic structures. Second, we test the timing for language users to combine words and comprehend sentences. How comprehension correlates with this low-frequency neural activity and whether it represents endogenous neural response or evoked response remains unclear. This dissertation manipulates the length of syllables and regularity between syllables to test the hypotheses. The results support the view that this neural activity reflects endogenous response and suggest that it reflects top-down processing. Third, what semantic information modulates this low-frequency neural activity is unknown. This dissertation examines several semantic variables typically associated with different aspects of semantic processing. The stimuli are created by varying the statistical association between words, world knowledge, and the conceptual results of semantic composition. The current results suggest that low-frequency neural activity is not driven by semantic processing. Based on the above findings, we propose that neural activities in the delta band reflect top-down predictive processing that involves syntactic information directly but not semantic information.PHDLinguisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169907/1/chiawenl_1.pd

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