54 research outputs found

    Children mix direct and indirect speech:evidence from pronoun comprehension

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    This study investigates children's acquisition of the distinction between direct speech (Elephant said, “I get the football”) and indirect speech (Elephant said that he gets the football), by measuring children's interpretation of first, second, and third person pronouns. Based on evidence from various linguistic sources, we hypothesize that the direct–indirect distinction is acquired relatively late. We also predict more mistakes for third person pronouns compared to first and second person pronouns. We tested 136 Dutch-speaking children between four and twelve in a referent selection task and found that children interpret pronouns in direct speech predominantly as in indirect speech, supporting our hypothesis about a late acquisition of the direct–indirect distinction. In addition, we found differences between I, you, and he that deviate from a simple first and second vs. third person split. We discuss our results in the light of cross-linguistic findings of direct–indirect mixing

    Post-focus compression in Brahvi and Balochi

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    Previous research has shown that post-focus compression (PFC) - the reduction of pitch range and intensity after a focused word in an utterance, is a robust means of marking focus, but it is present only in some languages. The presence of PFC appears to follow language family lines. The present study is a further exploration of the distribution of PFC by investigating Brahvi, a Dravidian language, and Balochi, an Indo-Iranian language. Balochi is predicted to show PFC given its presence in other Iranian languages. Dravidian languages have not been studied for prosodic focus before and they are not related to any languages with PFC. We recorded twenty native speakers from each language producing declarative sentences in different focus conditions. Acoustic analyses showed that, in both languages, post-focus f 0 and other correlates were significantly reduced relative to baseline neutral-focus sentences, but post-focus lowering of f 0, and intensity was greater in magnitude in Balochi than in Brahvi. The Balochi results confirm our prediction, while the Brahvi results offer the first evidence of PFC in a Dravidian language. The finding of PFC in a Dravidian language is relevant to a postulated origin of PFC, which is related to the controversial Nostratic Macrofamily hypothesis

    Towards a model of phonological acquisition in government phonology

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    Child phonology shows some interesting and systematic differences from adult phonology. In child phonology, for example, vowel harmony and consonant harmony are common phonological effects (Ingram 1986). In adult phonology, however, vowel harmony is restricted as a language-specific effect and consonant harmony is widely unattested in languages (Vihman 1978, Stemberger and Stoel-Gammon 1991).In order to understand the cause of these differences between adult and child phonology, two essential questions must be raised by investigators (Kaye 1997). 1. What is phonology? 2. What needs to be learnt in order to reach a language-specific adult phonology? Models such as Government Phonology (Kaye, Lowenstamm and Vergnaud 1985 et seq.) are attempts at representing phonology. Government Phonology in particular has not, however, been widely used to yield any such representation of the development of phonology in children. This thesis thus approaches a tentative model of phonological acquisition based in the Government Phonology framework. In Part one, the model of Government Phonology is set out. In Part two, the principles and parameters that govern this model of phonology are manipulated in order to hypothesize the mechanisms available at four stages of acquisition: G(_1); the initial state, G(_2); A stage at which vowel harmony is evident in English and French children, G(_3); A stage at which consonant harmony is evident in English children, and G(_n); the adult English state. In Part three, the implications and problems of this tentative acquisition model and the Government Phonology model are assessed. Government Phonology is argued to provide a promising new line of research into phonological acquisition although much further research must be undertaken

    Syväoppiminen puhutun kielen tunnistamisessa

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    This thesis applies deep learning based classification techniques to identify natural languages from speech. The primary motivation behind this thesis is to implement accurate techniques for segmenting multimedia materials by the languages spoken in them. Several existing state-of-the-art, deep learning based approaches are discussed and a subset of the discussed approaches are selected for quantitative experimentation. The selected model architectures are trained on several well-known spoken language identification datasets containing several different languages. Segmentation granularity varies between models, some supporting input audio lengths of 0.2 seconds, while others require 10 second long input to make a language decision. Results from the thesis experiments show that an unsupervised representation of acoustic units, produced by a deep sequence-to-sequence auto encoder, cannot reach the language identification performance of a supervised representation, produced by a multilingual phoneme recognizer. Contrary to most existing results, in this thesis, acoustic-phonetic language classifiers trained on labeled spectral representations outperform phonotactic classifiers trained on bottleneck features of a multilingual phoneme recognizer. More work is required, using transcribed datasets and automatic speech recognition techniques, to investigate why phoneme embeddings did not outperform simple, labeled spectral features. While an accurate online language segmentation tool for multimedia materials could not be constructed, the work completed in this thesis provides several insights for building feasible, modern spoken language identification systems. As a side-product of the experiments performed during this thesis, a free open source spoken language identification software library called "lidbox" was developed, allowing future experiments to begin where the experiments of this thesis end.Tämä diplomityö keskittyy soveltamaan syviä neuroverkkomalleja luonnollisten kielien automaattiseen tunnistamiseen puheesta. Tämän työn ensisijainen tavoite on toteuttaa tarkka menetelmä multimediamateriaalien ositteluun niissä esiintyvien puhuttujen kielien perusteella. Työssä tarkastellaan useampaa jo olemassa olevaa neuroverkkoihin perustuvaa lähestymistapaa, joista valitaan alijoukko tarkempaan tarkasteluun, kvantitatiivisten kokeiden suorittamiseksi. Valitut malliarkkitehtuurit koulutetaan käyttäen eri puhetietokantoja, sisältäen useampia eri kieliä. Kieliosittelun hienojakoisuus vaihtelee käytettyjen mallien mukaan, 0,2 sekunnista 10 sekuntiin, riippuen kuinka pitkän aikaikkunan perusteella malli pystyy tuottamaan kieliennusteen. Diplomityön aikana suoritetut kokeet osoittavat, että sekvenssiautoenkoodaajalla ohjaamattomasti löydetty puheen diskreetti akustinen esitysmuoto ei ole riittävä kielen tunnistamista varten, verrattuna foneemitunnistimen tuottamaan, ohjatusti opetettuun foneemiesitysmuotoon. Tässä työssä havaittiin, että akustisfoneettiset kielentunnistusmallit saavuttavat korkeamman kielentunnistustarkkuuden kuin foneemiesitysmuotoa käyttävät kielentunnistusmallit, mikä eroaa monista kirjallisuudessa esitetyistä tuloksista. Diplomityön tutkimuksia on jatkettava, esimerkiksi litteroituja puhetietokantoja ja puheentunnistusmenetelmiä käyttäen, jotta pystyttäisiin selittämään miksi foneemimallin tuottamalla esitysmuodolla ei saatu parempia tuloksia kuin yksinkertaisemmalla, taajuusspektrin esitysmuodolla. Tämän työn aikana puhutun kielen tunnistaminen osoittautui huomattavasti haasteellisemmaksi kuin mitä työn alussa oli arvioitu, eikä työn aikana onnistuttu toteuttamaan tarpeeksi tarkkaa multimediamateriaalien kielienosittelumenetelmää. Tästä huolimatta, työssä esitetyt lähestymistavat tarjoavat toimivia käytännön menetelmiä puhutun kielen tunnistamiseen tarkoitettujen, modernien järjestelmien rakentamiseksi. Tämän diplomityön sivutuotteena syntyi myös puhutun kielen tunnistamiseen tarkoitettu avoimen lähdekoodin kirjasto nimeltä "lidbox", jonka ansiosta tämän työn kvantitatiivisia kokeita voi jatkaa siitä, mihin ne tämän työn päätteeksi jäivät

    Conditions on nuclear expressions in phonology.

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    This thesis aims to provide a principled account of the distribution of 'tense'/'lax', and 'high/low' vowels in vowel harmony systems. It is based on the principles and parameters of Government Phonology in which variation is accounted for by possible combinations of parameter settings. To explain variation in 'tense/lax' and high/low' distribution, I exploit the interaction of the parametric aspects of three universal mechanisms: Licensing Constraints, Head-licensing (both Kaye (1993b)), and the Complexity Condition (Harris (1990a)). The type of language data this thesis seeks to account for has received some attention in the phonological literature, in terms of other frameworks as well as Government Phonology. These treatments are evaluated here. Two of the three main tools employed are recent inclusions in Government Phonology. The role of Licensing Constraints as parameters on element distribution is explored in the context of the principles and parameters drawn on in this thesis. Licensing Constraints have certain repercussions for other aspects of the theory. These are explored in detail. Licensing Constraints interact with Head-Licensing, a principle explaining 'ATR' distribution. Additionally, I claim that some aspects of Head-Licensing are subject to parametric variation. The possible combinations of parameter settings are presented, illustrated with a variety of language data. The Complexity Condition is claimed to apply parametrically in processes taking place at the level of nuclear projection. As Head-Licensing occurs at this level, some languages are expected to enforce the Complexity Condition. I examine cases where this takes place, and the variety of strategies employed by languages for its maintenance. Finally, I explore how the interaction of Licensing Constraints, Head- Licensing and the Complexity Condition might provide a unified account of harmony processes traditionally described in terms of 'raising', 'lowering', '+ATR' and '- ATR'. I evaluate, and propose analyses of some cases from the literature

    Aspects of Information Structure in Kazakh : the Dynamic Syntax Approach

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    The Kazakh language is an under-researched Turkic language spoken in the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan and some neighbouring countries. While the grammar of this language is fairly well described, its information structural characteristics have not been examined in detail in the literature to date. This thesis aims to start filling this research gap by providing detailed descriptions of: the relation between information structure and word order; topic markers; and a pragmatically significant particle. Original, contextualised language examples are used to reject previous limited and rigid understanding of the relation between information structure and word order in Kazakh. It is shown that the information structural configurations of a Kazakh sentence are far more diverse than had been assumed. This conclusion is not only a revelation in its own right, but can also serve as a foundation for further research on the information structure of Kazakh, and other under-researched Turkic languages. This thesis also provides the first detailed descriptions of the three Kazakh topic markers. Numerous examples of their uses are presented in order to demonstrate the differences in these markers’ distribution and meaning. Several grammaticalisation processes related to these topic markers are revealed; it is proposed that these processes are currently at different stages of progress. Pragmatically significant particle ğoj is examined in detail for the first time: its distribution and meaning are illustrated with contextualised examples from various sources. It is posited that there are two syntactically diverse variants of this item which do, however, share the same existential semantics. The theoretical framework of Dynamic Syntax is employed throughout the thesis to underpin the first formal analyses of the phenomena under discussion

    Highly complex syllable structure: A typological and diachronic study

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    The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language whose strongest cross-linguistic patterns are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure. Syllable patterns involving long sequences of consonants are both typologically rare and theoretically marginalized, with few approaches treating these as natural or unproblematic structures. This book is an investigation of the properties of languages with highly complex syllable patterns. The two aims are (i) to establish whether these languages share other linguistic features in common such that they constitute a distinct linguistic type, and (ii) to identify possible diachronic paths and natural mechanisms by which these patterns come about in the history of a language. These issues are investigated in a diversified sample of 100 languages, 25 of which have highly complex syllable patterns. Languages with highly complex syllable structure are characterized by a number of phonetic, phonological, and morphological features which serve to set them apart from languages with simpler syllable patterns. These include specific segmental and suprasegmental properties, a higher prevalence of vowel reduction processes with extreme outcomes, and higher average morpheme/word ratios. The results suggest that highly complex syllable structure is a linguistic type distinct from but sharing some characteristics with other proposed holistic phonological types, including stress-timed and consonantal languages. The results point to word stress and specific patterns of gestural organization as playing important roles in the diachronic development of these patterns out of simpler syllable structures

    Highly complex syllable structure: A typological and diachronic study

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    The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language whose strongest cross-linguistic patterns are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure. Syllable patterns involving long sequences of consonants are both typologically rare and theoretically marginalized, with few approaches treating these as natural or unproblematic structures. This book is an investigation of the properties of languages with highly complex syllable patterns. The two aims are (i) to establish whether these languages share other linguistic features in common such that they constitute a distinct linguistic type, and (ii) to identify possible diachronic paths and natural mechanisms by which these patterns come about in the history of a language. These issues are investigated in a diversified sample of 100 languages, 25 of which have highly complex syllable patterns. Languages with highly complex syllable structure are characterized by a number of phonetic, phonological, and morphological features which serve to set them apart from languages with simpler syllable patterns. These include specific segmental and suprasegmental properties, a higher prevalence of vowel reduction processes with extreme outcomes, and higher average morpheme/word ratios. The results suggest that highly complex syllable structure is a linguistic type distinct from but sharing some characteristics with other proposed holistic phonological types, including stress-timed and consonantal languages. The results point to word stress and specific patterns of gestural organization as playing important roles in the diachronic development of these patterns out of simpler syllable structures
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