The Echo: October 28, 2016

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Non-native contrasts in Tongan loans

We present three case studies of marginal contrasts in Tongan loans from English, working with data from three speakers. Although Tongan lacks contrasts in stress or in CC vs. CVC sequences, secondary stress in loans is contrastive, and is sensitive to whether a vowel has a correspondent in the English source word; vowel deletion is also sensitive to whether a vowel is epenthetic as compared to the English source; and final vowel length is sensitive to whether the penultimate vowel is epenthetic, and if not, whether it corresponds to a stressed or unstressed vowel in the English source. We provide an analysis in the multilevel model of Boersma (1998) and Boersma & Hamann (2009), and show that the loan patterns can be captured using only constraints that plausibly are needed for native-word phonology, including constraints that reflect perceptual strategies

Cultivating Toddler Emergent Literacy Behaviors Using the Montessori Sandpaper Letters

The Montessori Sandpaper Letters are a powerful, multi-sensory tool which can cultivate emergent literacy behaviors. A half-day Montessori classroom of 17 students between the ages of 2.4 years old and 3.5 years old in a private, accredited, suburban Montessori school participated in this action research study. Participants completed a four-week intervention that implemented daily use of the Sandpaper Letters. Data was collected through daily observations, tally charts, individual lesson logs, and a modified pre- and post-assessment of the ability to identify letter sounds. Thirteen out of 17 participants, or 76%, showed an increase in letter sound identification. In addition there was a significant increase in the number of child-initiated Sandpaper Letter lessons (as opposed to adult-initiated lessons). Also seen was an advancement of the children’s language skills from concrete to symbolic. This included the advent of writing, and the spontaneous appearance of activities demonstrating both phonological and phonemic awareness. These activities related directly to the Sandpaper Letters and demonstrated new and significant emergent literacy behaviors

Analysing Changes in the Acoustic Features of the Human Voice to Detect Depression amongst Biological Females in Higher Education

Depression significantly affects a large percentage of the population, with young adult females being one of the most at-risk demographics. Concurrently, there is a growing demand on healthcare, and with sufficient resources often unavailable to diagnose depression, new diagnostic methods are needed that are both cost-effective and accurate. The presence of depression is seen to significantly affect certain acoustic features of the human voice. Acoustic features have been found to exhibit subtle changes beyond the perception of the human auditory system when an individual has depression. With advances in speech processing, these subtle changes can be observed by machines. By measuring these changes, the human voice can be analysed to identify acoustic features that show a correlation with depression. The implementation of voice diagnosis would both reduce the burden on healthcare and ensure those with depression are diagnosed in a timely fashion, allowing them quicker access to treatment. The research project presents an analysis of voice data from 17 biological females between the ages of 20-26 years old in higher education as a means to detect depression. Eight participants were considered healthy with no history of depression, whilst the other nine currently had depression. Participants performed two vocal tasks consisting of extending sounds for a period of time and reading back a passage of speech. Six acoustic features were then measured from the voice data to determine whether these features can be utilised as diagnostic indicators of depression. The main finding of this study demonstrated one of the acoustic features measured demonstrates significant differences when comparing depressed and healthy individuals.<br/

Overview of reading disability

The purpose of this investigation was to present the findings of outstanding specialists in the field of reading on the subject of reading disability, its causes, diagnosis, and methods of remediation. Although this writer\u27s main interest was in the primary field, much of the literature surveyed dealing with reading difficulties did not specify grade levels. Therefore, when applicable to this investigation, articles dealing with reading difficulties in general were also cited

Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, and Exceptions

This dissertation explores new perspectives in phonological hidden structure learning (inferring structure not present in the speech signal that is necessary for phonological analysis; Tesar 1998, Jarosz 2013a, Boersma and Pater 2016), and extends this type of learning towards the domain of phonological features, towards derivations in Stratal OT (Bermúdez-Otero 1999), and towards exceptionality indices in probabilistic OT. Two more specific themes also come out: the possibility of inducing instead of pre-specifying the space of possible hidden structures, and the importance of cues in the data for triggering the use of hidden structure. In chapters 2 and 4, phonological features and exception groupings are induced by an unsupervised procedure that finds units not explicitly given to the learner. In chapters 2 and 3, there is an effect of non-specification or underspecification on the hidden level whenever the data does not give enough cues for that hidden level to be used. When features are hidden structure (chapter 2), they are only used for patterns that generalize across multiple segments. When intermediate derivational levels are hidden structure (chapter 3), the hidden structure necessary for opaque interactions is found more often when additional cues for the stratal affiliation of the opaque process are present in the data. Chapter 1 motivates and explains the central questions in this dissertation. Chapter 2 shows that phonological features can be induced from groupings of segments (which is motivated by phonetic non-transparency of feature assignment, see, e.g., Anderson 1981), and that patterns that do not generalize across segments are formulated in terms of segments in such a model. Chapter 3 implements a version of Stratal OT (Bermúdez-Otero 1999), and confirms Kiparsky’s (2000) hypothesis that evidence for an opaque process’ stratal affiliation makes it easier to learn an opaque interaction, even when opaque interactions are more difficult to learn than their transparent counterparts. Chapter 4 proposes a probabilistic (instead of non-probabilistic; e.g. Pater 2010) learner for lexically indexed constraints (Pater 2000) in Expectation Driven Learning (Jarosz submitted), and demonstrates its effectiveness on Dutch stress (van der Hulst 1984, Kager 1989, Nouveau 1994, van Oostendorp 1997)

Developmental Studies Courses and the Success of Non-Traditional Students at a Major Public University in the Southeast

The main purpose of the study was to determine the effect of academic preparation in basic skills classes on the academic performance in subsequent collegelevel classes for non-traditional students. A secondary purpose was to determine if academic preparation in basic skills classes had a long-term effect on academic performance as measured by graduation GPA. A third purpose was to obtain the perspectives of non-traditional students about the effect of academic preparation in basic skills classes on academic performance in subsequent college-level classes. Methodology included statistical comparisons of grade distributions and GPA using archival data from the Banner student record system, and a comparison of interview data for two groups: non-traditional students who took basic skills classes and Precalculus Algebra or English Composition I and non-traditional students who did not take basic skills classes but did take Precalculus Algebra or English Composition I. Statistical analysis showed a significant difference in the grades of non-traditional students who had basic skills classes before taking Precalculus Algebra or English Composition I and non-traditional students who took Precalculus Algebra or English Composition I without taking basic skills classes. Non-traditional students with basic skills classes made better grades, passed at a higher rate, and withdrew at a lower rate than students without basic skills classes, clearly demonstrating the benefit of basic skills classes for non-traditional students. Although the mean graduation GPA for nontraditional students with basic skills classes was greater than the mean graduation GPA for non-traditional students without basic skills classes, the difference was not statistically significant. Non-traditional students with basic skills classes who were interviewed indicated that even though they would not have taken the basic skills classes without placement into them, they found these classes to be beneficial and would recommend them to other non-traditional students, especially non-traditional students with an extended lapse of time before enrolling in college. Study results confirmed that a review of basic skills can make college-level courses easier and improve grades for non-traditional students

Opacity and Transparency in Phonological Change

Modern High German final obstruent devoicing is usually thought to descend from Middle German devoicing without any chronological break, despite the fact that the graphic representation of final devoicing ceased in the Early Modern period. However, an alternative account holds that the spelling change reflects the actual loss of the devoicing rule, and that therefore the modern rule has an independent origin. In particular, apocope of final schwa has been suggested as the cause of the loss of devoicing in Early Modern German. According to this theory, loss of devoicing occurred because schwa apocope rendered the devoicing rule opaque, and hence hard to learn. If true, we expect to see some evidence for opaque devoicing during the period that apocope was in progress. In accordance with this prediction, we found a statistically significant correlation between apocope and absence of final devoicing in a number of German texts of the 14th and 15th centuries. After the 15th century, devoicing is lost across the board, which correlates with the completion of schwa apocope and the loss of the opaque devoicing rule. This confirms our theoretical predictions. If apocope had not rendered devoicing opaque, we would have to conclude that Early Modern German schwa apocope was an instance of rule insertion. However, the structural description of neither apocope nor devoicing leads us to expect insertion. Instead, Modern German final devoicing appears to be an instance of rule re-affirmation, which entails that the devoicing rule, though opaque, remained productive in some dialects

L2 Korean Phonology: the acquisition of stops by English-and Finnish-speaking adults

The purpose of this thesis is to find the reason why attaining nativelike pronunciation is difficult in adult L2A. This thesis attempts to take a purely linguistic approach to find it by hypothising that the acquisition of segmental phonology is more than the physical matter of getting the articulators to move correctly and involves phonological rules and principles. The hypothesis was tested through the L2A of Korean stops, which was investigated in three parts; perception of stop segments in word-initial position, production of stop segments in word-initial position and production of stops involving phonological rules constrained by syntax (i.e. the tensification rule vs. the intervocalic voicing rule).Thirteen British English-speaking adults and fifteen Finnish-speaking adults participated in the experiment. The research subjects were divided into three different groups ('Inexperienced I'， 'Inexperienced n' and 'Experienced') according to the length of exposure to Korean. The subjects in the group of 'Inexperienced ľ were exposed to Korean for one year in their native countries, and the subjects in the group of 'Inexperienced 11' for two years in their native countries. The subjects in the group of 'Experienced' attended a Korean language course for one academic year at least in Korea. Firstly, as for perception of stop segments in word-initial position, both English- and Finnish-speaking learners performed better in discerning geminates from non- geminate segment in general. Especially, the two language groups of learners were native-like in discerning a geminate (AA) from a non-geminate of which the segment is different from the ones in the geminate (B). On the contrary, the Korean stops distinguished by the feature [sg] alone have appeared the most difficult for the L2 learners of Korean to acquire. The English- and Finnish-Speaking learners showed a similar pattern of difficulties in discerning Korean stops regarding the feature [sg]; however, differences between the two language groups were also found in the perception of word-initial Korean stops, which were caused by the absence or presence of geminate in the learners' L1. On the other hand, no progress was made by English- and Finnish-speaking learners in the acquisition of Korean stops in accordance with the length of exposure to Korean. Secondly, the production of word-initial stop segments appeared more successful than the perception of them. The difficulty in producing word-initial stops seemed to be caused by Korean-particular phonological representations rather than controlling the degree of VOT values. As for the developmental aspect, English- and Finnish-speaking learners showed the improvement in the segmental production task according to the length of exposure to Korean unlike in the segmental perception task. Thirdly, the English- and Finnish-speaking I earners performed equally poorly on the tensification rule despite the differences in their L1’s. One reason was that the learners in both language groups were not advanced enough to sense the interaction between the phonological rule and syntactic condition in the Korean grammar. Another reason was orthographic influence. Regardless of the two language groups' similarly poor results in performance on the tensification rule, it was presumed that only Finnish speakers would be able to acquire the Korean-specific rule with the supposition that positive L1 transfer might occur at the even advanced stages of learning. In the light of the findings, it was concluded that the hypothesis of this thesis was supported by results from the experiment. Observing that the L2 learners had far greater difficulty in their production of stops involved in the tensification rule constrained by syntax than in their production of word-initial stops, it is concluded that the difficulty of mastering L2 phonology is due to the complexity of phonological rules applying beyond the component of phonology or across phonological domains in the prosodie hierarchy, some of which provide a means for mapping the syntax to the phonology. Therefore, all the complex phonological rules and principles of a segment must be acquired for the target pronunciation