Epenthetic vowels in Japanese: A perceptual illusion?

In four cross-linguistic experiments comparing French and Japanese hearers, we found that the phonotactic properties of Japanese (very reduced set of syllable types) induce Japanese listeners to perceive ``illusory'' vowels inside consonant clusters in VCCV stimuli. In Experiments 1 and 2, we used a continuum of stimuli ranging from no vowel (e.g. ebzo) to a full vowel between the consonants (e.g. ebuzo). Japanese, but not French participants, reported the presence of a vowel [u] between consonants, even in stimuli with no vowel. A speeded ABX discrimination paradigm was used in Experiments 3 and 4, and revealed that Japanese participants had trouble discriminating between VCCV and VCuCV stimuli. French participants, in contrast had problems discriminating items that differ in vowel length (ebuzo vs. ebuuzo), a distinctive contrast in Japanese but not in French. We conclude that models of speech perception have to be revised to account for phonotactically-based assimilations

A role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition

Infants segment words from fluent speech during the same period when they are learning phonetic categories, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which sounds appear. We use a Bayesian model to illustrate how feedback from segmented words might constrain phonetic category learning by providing information about which sounds occur together in words. Simulations demonstrate that word-level information can successfully disambiguate overlapping English vowel categories. Learning patterns in the model are shown to parallel human behavior from artificial language learning tasks. These findings point to a central role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition and provide a framework for incorporating top-down constraints into models of category learning

Spanish epenthesis: Formal and performance perspectives

published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities

Recent evidence suggests that cognitive pressures associated with language acquisition and use could affect the organization of the lexicon. On one hand, consistent with noisy channel models of language (e.g., Levy, 2008), the phonological distance between wordforms should be maximized to avoid perceptual confusability (a pressure for dispersion). On the other hand, a lexicon with high phonological regularity would be simpler to learn, remember and produce (e.g., Monaghan et al., 2011) (a pressure for clumpiness). Here we investigate wordform similarity in the lexicon, using measures of word distance (e.g., phonological neighborhood density) to ask whether there is evidence for dispersion or clumpiness of wordforms in the lexicon. We develop a novel method to compare lexicons to phonotactically-controlled baselines that provide a null hypothesis for how clumpy or sparse wordforms would be as the result of only phonotactics. Results for four languages, Dutch, English, German and French, show that the space of monomorphemic wordforms is clumpier than what would be expected by the best chance model according to a wide variety of measures: minimal pairs, average Levenshtein distance and several network properties. This suggests a fundamental drive for regularity in the lexicon that conflicts with the pressure for words to be as phonologically distinct as possible. Keywords: Linguistics; Lexical design; Communication; Phonotactic

Aspekte der Charakterisierung phonologischer Sprachstörungen vs. verzögerter Spracherwerb bei jordanischem Arabisch sprechenden Kindern

Bader S'da SI. Issues in the characterisation of phonological speech impairment vs. delayed acquisition in Jordanian Arabic-Speaking children. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2010.Eine Studie des Spracherwerbs des jordanischen Arabisch bei jungen Muttersprachlern.A study with children speaking or acquiring Jordanian Arabic with or without phonological impairments

Cortical responses to natural speech reflect probabilistic phonotactics

Humans comprehend speech despite the various challenges of real-world environments, such as loud noise and mispronunciation. Our auditory system is robust to these thanks to the integration of the upcoming sensory input with prior knowledge and expectations built on language-specific regularities. One such regularity regards the permissible phoneme sequences, which determine the likelihood that a word belongs to a given language (phonotactic probability; “blick” is more likely to be an English word than “bnick”). Previous research suggested that violations of these rules modulate brain evoked responses such as the N400 and the late positive complex. Yet several fundamental questions remain unresolved, especially regarding the neural encoding and integration strategy of phonotactic information. Here, we used linear modelling approaches to assess the influence of phonotactic probabilities on the brain responses to narrative speech measured with non-invasive EEG. We found that the relationship between continuous speech and EEG responses is best described when the speech descriptor includes phonotactic probabilities. This provides us with a methodology to isolate and measure the brain responses to phonotactics using natural speech at the individual subject-level. Furthermore, such low-frequency signals showed the strongest speech-EEG interactions at latencies of 100-400 ms, supporting a pre-lexical role of phonotactic information

Gradient Acceptability in Mandarin Nonword Judgment

Syllable well-formedness judgment experiments reveal that speakers exhibit gradient judgment on novel words, and the gradience has been attributed to both grammatical factors and lexical statistics (e.g., Coetzee, 2008). This study investigates gradient phonotactics stemming from the violations of four types of grammatical constraints in Mandarin Chinese: 1) principled phonotactic constraints, 2) accidental phonotactic constraints, 3) allophonic restrictions, and 4) segmental-tonal cooccurrence restrictions. A syllable well-formedness judgment experiment was conducted with native Mandarin speakers to examine how the grammatical and lexical statistics factors contribute to the variation in phonotactic acceptability judgment

The acquisition of complex onsets in Icelandic: the effects of markedness, sonority, and frequency

The acquisition of consonant clusters is determined by several underlying factors, and recent studies demonstrated that input frequency, investigated in isolation, cannot account for the order of acquisition (e.g., Jarosz 2017). The study conducted in this thesis was an empirical test of the theories of phonological acquisition. It investigated the simplification patterns occurring in initial clusters and the role of sonority, type frequency, and articulatory complexity of individual segments on the order of their acquisition. To investigate the influence of these factors on accuracy in producing initial consonant clusters, I analyzed data from 68 monolingual children (aged 2;6-4;3) acquiring Icelandic, available as a part of the Icelandic Másdóttir corpus (Másdóttir 2014, Másdóttir et al. 2021), which is a part of the PhonBank corpora (Rose & MacWhinney 2014). The investigation of simplification patterns revealed a discrepancy in processes targeting branching onsets and sC clusters. Additionally, the results showed that Icelandic children produced clusters composed of stop and liquid as two segments most frequently. Fricative-initial clusters were most frequently realized as one consonant. I demonstrated how two sonority-based generalizations, the Minimal Sonority Distance and the Sonority Dispersion Principle, did not account for all the tendencies in the order of acquisition, and could not predict children’s low accuracy on fricative-initial clusters. The type frequencies of initial onset clusters in Icelandic did not correlate with children’s accuracy. The findings revealed that what has previously been attributed to the role of sonority, could be explained on the basis of articulatory complexity of individual cluster members, or possibly perceptual cues

(Un)markedness of trills : the case of Slavic r-palatalisation

This paper evaluates trills [r] and their palatalized counterparts [rj] from the point of view of markedness. It is argued that [r]s are unmarked sounds in comparison to [rj]s which follows from the examination of the following parameters: (a) frequency of occurrence, (b) articulatory and aerodynamic characteristics, (c) perceptual features, (d) emergence in the process of language acquisition, (e) stability from a diachronic point of view, (f) phonotactic distribution, and (g) implications. Several markedness aspects of [r]s and [rj] are analyzed on the basis of Slavic languages which offer excellent material for the evaluation of trills. Their phonetic characteristics incorporated into phonetically grounded constraints are employed for a phonological OT-analysis of r-palatalization in two selected languages: Polish and Czech