426 research outputs found
The phonological development of adult Japanese learners of English : a longitudinal study of perception and production.
SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN042757 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo
Reduktion in natĂŒrlicher Sprache
Natural (conversational) speech, compared to cannonical speech, is earmarked by the tremendous amount of variation that often leads to a massive change in pronunciation. Despite many attempts to explain and theorize the variability in conversational speech, its unique characteristics have not played a significant role in linguistic modeling. One of the reasons for variation in natural speech lies in a tendency of speakers to reduce speech, which may drastically alter the phonetic shape of words. Despite the massive loss of information due to reduction, listeners are often able to understand conversational speech even in the presence of background noise. This dissertation investigates two reduction processes, namely regressive place assimilation across word boundaries, and massive reduction and provides novel data from the analyses of speech corpora combined with experimental results from perception studies to reach a better understanding of how humans handle natural speech. The successes and failures of two models dealing with data from natural speech are presented: The FUL-model (Featurally Underspecified Lexicon, Lahiri & Reetz, 2002), and X-MOD (an episodic model, Johnson, 1997). Based on different assumptions, both models make different predictions for the two types of reduction processes under investigation. This dissertation explores the nature and dynamics of these processes in speech production and discusses its consequences for speech perception. More specifically, data from analyses of running speech are presented investigating the amount of reduction that occurs in naturally spoken German. Concerning production, the corpus analysis of regressive place assimilation reveals that it is not an obligatory process. At the same time, there emerges a clear asymmetry: With only very few exceptions, only [coronal] segments undergo assimilation, [labial] and [dorsal] segments usually do not. Furthermore, there seem to be cases of complete neutralization where the underlying Place of Articulation feature has undergone complete assimilation to the Place of Articulation feature of the upcoming segment. Phonetic analyses further underpin these findings. Concerning deletions and massive reductions, the results clearly indicate that phonological rules in the classical generative tradition are not able to explain the reduction patterns attested in conversational speech. Overall, the analyses of deletion and massive reduction in natural speech did not exhibit clear-cut patterns. For a more in-depth examination of reduction factors, the case of final /t/ deletion is examined by means of a new corpus constructed for this purpose. The analysis of this corpus indicates that although phonological context plays an important role on the deletion of segments (i.e. /t/), this arises in the form of tendencies, not absolute conditions. This is true for other deletion processes, too. Concerning speech perception, a crucial part for both models under investigation (X-MOD and FUL) is how listeners handle reduced speech. Five experiments investigate the way reduced speech is perceived by human listeners. Results from two experiments show that regressive place assimilations can be treated as instances of complete neutralizations by German listeners. Concerning massively reduced words, the outcome of transcription and priming experiments suggest that such words are not acceptable candidates of the intended lexical items for listeners in the absence of their proper phrasal context. Overall, the abstractionist FUL-model is found to be superior in explaining the data. While at first sight, X-MOD deals with the production data more readily, FUL provides a better fit for the perception results. Another important finding concerns the role of phonology and phonetics in general. The results presented in this dissertation make a strong case for models, such as FUL, where phonology and phonetics operate at different levels of the mental lexicon, rather than being integrated into one. The findings suggest that phonetic variation is not part of the representation in the mental lexicon.NatĂŒrliche (spontane) Sprache in Dialogen zeichnet sich, im Vergleich zu kanonischer Sprache, vor allem durch das enorme AusmaĂ an Variation aus. Diese kann oft dazu fĂŒhren, dass Wörter in der Aussprache massiv verĂ€ndert werden. Trotz einiger BemĂŒhungen, VariabilitĂ€t in natĂŒrlicher Sprache zu erklĂ€ren und theoretisch zu fassen, haben die einzigartigen Merkmale natĂŒrlicher Sprache kaum Eingang in linguistische Modelle gefunden. Einer der GrĂŒnde, warum Variation in natĂŒrlicher Sprache zu beobachten ist, liegt in der Tendenz der Sprecher, Sprache zu reduzieren. Dies kann die phonetische Gestalt von Wörtern drastisch beeinflussen. Obwohl hierdurch massiv Information durch Reduktion verloren geht, sind Hörer oft in der Lage Spontansprache zu verstehen, sogar, wenn HintergrundgerĂ€usche dies erschweren. Diese Dissertation untersucht zwei Reduktionsprozesse: Regressive Assimilation des Artikulationsortes ĂŒber Wortgrenzen hinweg und Massive Reduktion. Es werden neue Daten prĂ€sentiert, die durch die Analysen von Sprachkorpora gewonnen wurden. AuĂerdem stehen experimentelle Ergebnisse von Perzeptionsstudien im Mittelpunkt, die helfen sollen, besser zu verstehen, wie Menschen mit natĂŒrlicher Sprache umgehen. Die Dissertation zeigt die Erfolge und Probleme von zwei Modellen im Umgang mit Daten von natĂŒrlicher Sprache auf: Das FUL-Modell (Featurally Underspecified Lexicon , Lahiri & Reetz, 2002), und X-MOD (ein episodisches Modell, Johnson, 1997). Aufgrund unterschiedlicher Annahmen machen die zwei Modelle verschiedene Vorhersagen fĂŒr die beiden Reduktionsprozesse, die in dieser Dissertation untersucht werden. Es werden Art und Auswirkungen der beiden Prozesse fĂŒr Sprachproduktion untersucht und die Konsequenzen fĂŒr das Sprachverstehen beleuchtet. Was die Sprachproduktion betrifft, so zeigt eine Korpusanalyse von natĂŒrlich gesprochenem Deutsch, dass der Reduktionsprozess regressive Assimilation des Artikulationsortes nicht obligatorisch statt findet. Gleichzeitig wird eine hervorstechende Asymmetrie deutlich: Abgesehen von einigen wenigen Ausnahmen werden ausschlieĂlich [koronale] Segmente assimiliert, [labiale] und [dorsale] Segmente normalerweise nicht. AuĂerdem, so legen die Produktionsdaten nahe, gibt es FĂ€lle, in denen die Assimilation des Artikulationsortes an den Artikulationsort des Folgesegmentes komplett ist, also eine vollstĂ€ndige Neutralisierung der Merkmalskontraste vom Sprecher vorgenommen wurde. Phonetische Analysen bestĂ€tigen dieses Resultat. Im Fall von Löschungen und massiven Reduktion demonstrieren die Ergebnisse eindeutig, dass phonologische Regeln â im klassischen generativen Sinne â nicht in der Lage sind, die Reduktionsmuster zu beschreiben, die in Spontansprache vorkommen. Alles in allem zeigen die Analysen von massiven Reduktionen und Löschungen keine eindeutigen Muster auf. Um einzelne Faktoren, die Reduktionen beeinflussen, genauer untersuchen zu können, wurde die Löschung von (Wort) finalem /t/ anhand eines neuen, fĂŒr diesen Zweck kreierten Korpus durchgefĂŒhrt. Die Analyse dieses Korpus unterstreicht, dass, obwohl phonologischer Kontext eine gewichtigen Einfluss darauf hat, ob Segmente (d.h. /t/) gelöscht werden, dieser Einfluss eher als Tendenz verstanden werden muss, nicht als absolute Bedingung. Dieses Resultat trifft auch auf andere Löschungsprozesse zu. Beide Modelle (X-MOD und FUL), die in dieser Dissertation untersucht werden, gehen im Kern der Frage nach, wie Hörer Sprache verstehen. FĂŒnf Experimente untersuchen, wie reduzierte Sprache von menschlichen Hörern wahrgenommen wird. Ergebnisse von zwei Studien zeigen, dass Assimilationen von deutschen Hörern durchaus als komplett neutralisiert wahrgenommen werden. Was die Perzeption von massiv reduzierten Wörtern betrifft, belegen die Resultate von Transkriptionsstudien und Priming-Experimenten, dass solche Wörter nicht als Wortkandidaten fĂŒr die korrekten lexikalischen EintrĂ€ge akzeptiert werden, wenn sie ohne ihren Satz-Kontext dargeboten werden. Insgesamt ist das abstraktionistische FUL-Modell besser in der Lage, die Daten zu erklĂ€ren, die in dieser Dissertation prĂ€sentiert werden. Auf den ersten Blick scheint X-MOD zwar etwas besser geeignet, die Produktionsdaten zu erklĂ€ren, hauptsĂ€chlich jedoch, weil Variation als Grundannahme im Modell verankert ist. FUL ist klar ĂŒberlegen, was die Perzeptionsseite betrifft. Ein weiteres wichtiges Ergebnis dieser Dissertation ist die Rolle, die Phonologie und Phonetik im Allgemeinen zugedacht werden kann. Die Resultate, die hier vorgestellt werden, liefern starke Argumente fĂŒr Modelle â wie z.B. FUL â in denen Phonologie und Phonetik auf verschiedenen Ebenen des mentalen Lexikons aktiv sind und nicht in einem integriert sind. Die Befunde legen nahe, dass phonetische Variation nicht Teil der ReprĂ€sentation im mentalen Lexikon ist
Towards a definition of schwa : an acoustic investigation of vowel reduction in English
This thesis reports a single speaker acoustic study of vowel variability in connected
speech. Over eight thousand vowel tokens taken from a corpus of read sentences are
examined. The aim of the thesis is to achieve a better understanding of the nature of
vowel reduction in English. Three questions are addressed. The first of these
concerns the phonetic characterisation of schwa, the central or 'reduced' vowel.
Schwa's contextual variability is assessed with reference to the question of whether or
not it has an independent phonetic target. The second question concerns the role of
stress in conditioning vowel reduction. Patterns of variability for sententially stressed
and unstressed vowel tokens are examined in order to determine how far stress and
context effects interact to influence vowel quality. The final question concerns the
potential ditf erences between vowels with respect to inherent variability, that is,
whether some vowels are inherently more susceptible to coarticulatory effects than
other vowels.
Maximal context-dependency for schwa strongly supports the hypothesis that it is
completely unspecified for tongue position. The data indicate that it is also highly
unspecified for jaw position. Evidence that schwa is targetless and can occupy almost
any position in the vowel space depending on context, argues against the traditional
concept of vowel reduction as an independent process of articulatory and/or acoustic
centralisation. Greater context sensitivity for sententially unstressed vowels
compared with their sententially stressed counterparts also supports an account of
vowel reduction in terms of contextual assimilation.
The results also indicate a continuum of underspecification. This ranges from-the
more peripheral vowels /i, a, É, É, Æ/ which show the least contextual variability and
which may be thought of as the most narrowly specified vowels to the more central
vowels /I, Δ , Đ·, Ꭷ, Ʊ/ and, in the present data, /u/, which show greater overall context dependency.
It is proposed that greater acoustic stability for the more peripheral
vowels reflects quantal acoustic properties and tighter articulatory and/or perceptual
constraints on variability.Overall, the results support the view that vowel reduction represents a means of
economising on articulatory effort. Schwa, the endpoint of the reduction process
represents minimal articulatory effort insofar as it represents the straight-line
interpolation between consonants and hence minimal resistance to coarticulatory
effects. Shorter durations, greater context dependency and, in the case of the
peripheral vowels, less extreme formant values for sententially unstressed compared
with sententially stressed vowels reflects a reduction in articulatory effort and
consequently less displacement from neutral. In view of the greater contextdependency
observed for the more central vowels generally compared with the more
peripheral vowels, the tense/lax alternation in phonological vowel reduction can also
be interpreted as a saving on articulatory effort. A principal advantage of an account
of English vowel reduction in terms of phonetic underspecification is that phonetic
and phonological vowel reduction may be accounted for by the same mechanism
The effect of orthography on the recognition of pronunciation variants
published Online First October 24, 2019In conversational speech, it is very common for wordsâ segments to be reduced or deleted. However,
previous research has consistently shown that during spoken word recognition, listeners prefer wordsâ
canonical pronunciation over their reduced pronunciations (e.g., pretty pronounced [priti] vs. [priÉŸi]),
even when the latter are far more frequent. This surprising effect violates most current accounts of spoken
word recognition. The current study tests the possibility that wordsâ orthography may be 1 factor driving
the advantage for canonical pronunciations during spoken word recognition. Participants learned new
words presented in their reduced pronunciation (e.g., [trÉti]), paired with 1 of 3 spelling possibilities: (a)
no accompanying spelling, (b) a spelling consistent with the reduced pronunciation (a reduced spelling,
e.g., âtroddyâ), or (c) a spelling consistent with the canonical pronunciation (a canonical spelling, e.g.,
âtrottyâ). When listeners were presented with the new wordsâ canonical forms for the first time, they
erroneously accepted them at a higher rate if the words had been learned with a canonical spelling. These
results remained robust after a delay period of 48 hr, and after additional learning trials. Our findings
suggest that orthography plays an important role in the recognition of spoken words and that it is a
significant factor driving the canonical pronunciation advantage observed previously.This work was supported by the National Science Foundation Grant
IBSS-1519908. We also acknowledge support provided by Ministerio de
Ciencia E Innovacion Grant PSI2017-82563-P, by the Basque Government
through the BERC 2018-2021 program, by Economic and Social Research
Council (UL) Grant ES/R006288/1 and by Ayuda Centro de Excelencia
Severo Ochoa SEV-2015-0490. We thank Marie Huffman and Donna Kat
for help with this project
The mental lexicon is fully specified : evidence from eye-tracking
Four visual-world experiments, in which listeners heard spoken words and saw printed words,
compared an optimal-perception account with the theory of phonological underspecification.
This theory argues that default phonological features are not specified in the mental lexicon,
leading to asymmetric lexical matching: Mismatching input ("pin") activates lexical entries
with underspecified coronal stops ('tin'), but lexical entries with specified labial stops ('pin') are
not activated by mismatching input ("tin"). The eye-tracking data failed to show such a pattern.
Although words that were phonologically similar to the spoken target attracted more looks than
unrelated distractors, this effect was symmetric in Experiment 1 with minimal pairs ("tin"-
"pin") and in Experiments 2 and 3 with words with an onset overlap ("peacock" - "teacake").
Experiment 4 revealed that /t/-initial words were looked at more frequently if the spoken input
mismatched only in terms of place than if it mismatched in place and voice, contrary to the
assumption that /t/ is unspecified for place and voice. These results show that speech
perception uses signal-driven information to the fullest, as predicted by an optimal perception
account.peer-reviewe
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This paper explores three universal tendencies in spoken language acquisition: consonant and vowel harmony, cluster reduction and systemic simplification, using a corpus of 1018 signs from a single child exposed to British Sign Language from birth. Child signs were recorded from naturalistic deaf parent-deaf child interaction between the ages of 19-24 months. Child errors were analysed by handshape, movement and location segments, as well as the accurate production of prosodic features, using an autosegmental phonology approach. Unadult like forms at this age were observed with 41% of handshapes, 45% of movements and 25% of locations. There were 47% of signs produced with unadult like prosodic features. Analysis of the results concludes that early child signing broadly follows proposed universal tendencies in language acquisition
On the Status of Empty Nuclei in Phonology
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