Morphological word structure in English and Swedish : the evidence from prosody

Trubetzkoy's recognition of a delimitative function of phonology, serving to signal boundaries between morphological units, is expressed in terms of alignment constraints in Optimality Theory, where the relevant constraints require specific morphological boundaries to coincide with phonological structure (Trubetzkoy 1936, 1939, McCarthy & Prince 1993). The approach pursued in the present article is to investigate the distribution of phonological boundary signals to gain insight into the criteria underlying morphological analysis. The evidence from English and Swedish suggests that necessary and sufficient conditions for word-internal morphological analysis concern the recognizability of head constituents, which include the rightmost members of compounds and head affixes. The claim is that the stability of word-internal boundary effects in historical perspective cannot in general be sufficiently explained in terms of memorization and imitation of phonological word form. Rather, these effects indicate a morphological parsing mechanism based on the recognition of word-internal head constituents. Head affixes can be shown to contrast systematically with modifying affixes with respect to syntactic function, semantic content, and prosodic properties. That is, head affixes, which cannot be omitted, often lack inherent meaning and have relatively unmarked boundaries, which can be obscured entirely under specific phonological conditions. By contrast, modifying affixes, which can be omitted, consistently have inherent meaning and have stronger boundaries, which resist prosodic fusion in all phonological contexts. While these correlations are hardly specific to English and Swedish it remains to be investigated to which extent they hold cross-linguistically. The observation that some of the constituents identified on the basis of prosodic evidence lack inherent meaning raises the issue of compositionality. I will argue that certain systematic aspects of word meaning cannot be captured with reference to the syntagmatic level, but require reference to the paradigmatic level instead. The assumption is then that there are two dimensions of morphological analysis: syntagmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for decomposing words in terms of labelled constituents, and paradigmatic analysis, which centers on the criteria for establishing relations among (whole) words in the mental lexicon. While meaning is intrinsically connected with paradigmatic analysis (e.g. base relations, oppositeness) it is not essential to syntagmatic analysis

Exploiting Contextual Information for Prosodic Event Detection Using Auto-Context

Prosody and prosodic boundaries carry significant information regarding linguistics and paralinguistics and are important aspects of speech. In the field of prosodic event detection, many local acoustic features have been investigated; however, contextual information has not yet been thoroughly exploited. The most difficult aspect of this lies in learning the long-distance contextual dependencies effectively and efficiently. To address this problem, we introduce the use of an algorithm called auto-context. In this algorithm, a classifier is first trained based on a set of local acoustic features, after which the generated probabilities are used along with the local features as contextual information to train new classifiers. By iteratively using updated probabilities as the contextual information, the algorithm can accurately model contextual dependencies and improve classification ability. The advantages of this method include its flexible structure and the ability of capturing contextual relationships. When using the auto-context algorithm based on support vector machine, we can improve the detection accuracy by about 3% and F-score by more than 7% on both two-way and four-way pitch accent detections in combination with the acoustic context. For boundary detection, the accuracy improvement is about 1% and the F-score improvement reaches 12%. The new algorithm outperforms conditional random fields, especially on boundary detection in terms of F-score. It also outperforms an n-gram language model on the task of pitch accent detection

P3b reflects periodicity in linguistic sequences

Temporal predictability is thought to affect stimulus processing by facilitating the allocation of attentional resources. Recent studies have shown that periodicity of a tonal sequence results in a decreased peak latency and a larger amplitude of the P3b compared with temporally random, i.e., aperiodic sequences. We investigated whether this applies also to sequences of linguistic stimuli (syllables), although speech is usually aperiodic. We compared aperiodic syllable sequences with two temporally regular conditions. In one condition, the interval between syllable onset was fixed, whereas in a second condition the interval between the syllables’ perceptual center (p-center) was kept constant. Event-related potentials were assessed in 30 adults who were instructed to detect irregularities in the stimulus sequences. We found larger P3b amplitudes for both temporally predictable conditions as compared to the aperiodic condition and a shorter P3b latency in the p-center condition than in both other conditions. These findings demonstrate that even in acoustically more complex sequences such as syllable streams, temporal predictability facilitates the processing of deviant stimuli. Furthermore, we provide first electrophysiological evidence for the relevance of the p-center concept in linguistic stimulus processing

Automatic prosodic analysis for computer aided pronunciation teaching

Correct pronunciation of spoken language requires the appropriate modulation of acoustic characteristics of speech to convey linguistic information at a suprasegmental level. Such prosodic modulation is a key aspect of spoken language and is an important component of foreign language learning, for purposes of both comprehension and intelligibility. Computer aided pronunciation teaching involves automatic analysis of the speech of a non-native talker in order to provide a diagnosis of the learner's performance in comparison with the speech of a native talker. This thesis describes research undertaken to automatically analyse the prosodic aspects of speech for computer aided pronunciation teaching. It is necessary to describe the suprasegmental composition of a learner's speech in order to characterise significant deviations from a native-like prosody, and to offer some kind of corrective diagnosis. Phonological theories of prosody aim to describe the suprasegmental composition of speech..

Temiar Reduplication in One-Level Prosodic Morphology

Temiar reduplication is a difficult piece of prosodic morphology. This paper presents the first computational analysis of Temiar reduplication, using the novel finite-state approach of One-Level Prosodic Morphology originally developed by Walther (1999b, 2000). After reviewing both the data and the basic tenets of One-level Prosodic Morphology, the analysis is laid out in some detail, using the notation of the FSA Utilities finite-state toolkit (van Noord 1997). One important discovery is that in this approach one can easily define a regular expression operator which ambiguously scans a string in the left- or rightward direction for a certain prosodic property. This yields an elegant account of base-length-dependent triggering of reduplication as found in Temiar.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures. Finite-State Phonology: SIGPHON-2000, Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Phonology, pp.13-21. Aug. 6, 2000. Luxembour

МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ З ПРАКТИЧНОГО КУРСУ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ (вступний фонетичний курс) для студентів 1 курсу (напрям підготовки 0305 “Філологія”, спеціальність 6.030500 “Переклад”)

МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ З ПРАКТИЧНОГО КУРСУ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ (вступний фонетичний курс) для студентів 1 курсу (напрям підготовки 0305 “Філологія”, спеціальність 6.030500 “Переклад”)МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ З ПРАКТИЧНОГО КУРСУ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ (вступний фонетичний курс) для студентів 1 курсу (напрям підготовки 0305 “Філологія”, спеціальність 6.030500 “Переклад”

МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ З ПРАКТИЧНОГО КУРСУ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ (вступний фонетичний курс) для студентів 1 курсу (напрям підготовки 0305 “Філологія”, спеціальність 6.030500 “Переклад”)

МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ З ПРАКТИЧНОГО КУРСУ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ (вступний фонетичний курс) для студентів 1 курсу (напрям підготовки 0305 “Філологія”, спеціальність 6.030500 “Переклад”)МЕТОДИЧНІ ВКАЗІВКИ З ПРАКТИЧНОГО КУРСУ АНГЛІЙСЬКОЇ МОВИ (вступний фонетичний курс) для студентів 1 курсу (напрям підготовки 0305 “Філологія”, спеціальність 6.030500 “Переклад”