Usage-based phonology and simulations as means to investigate unintuitive voicing behavior

According to studies conducted by Coetzee & Pretorius (2010) and Rothenberg (1968), languages from the Sotho-Tswana group of Bantu languages demonstrate unintuitive voicing behavior in devoicing of post-nasal voiced plosives (/mb/-->[mp]) -- unintuitive in that greater articulatory effort is required to terminate voicing than to maintain it (Westbury & Keating, 1986). Nasals preceding stop consonants are said to have appeared in Bantu languages in order to facilitate production of voicing during the stop segment and were lost later during language evolutionary changes in languages like Swahili, Sotho or Duala (Meinhof, 1932). Current studies on Tswana and Shekgalagari (Coetzee & Pretorius, 2 010; Hyman, 2001; Solé et al., 2010), however, demonstrate that nasal segments remained in those languages – surprisingly not only before voiced stops but also before voiceless ones.We present an attempt at using computational simulations on voicing behavior of Tswana post-nasal stops. Previous approaches to phonological simulations (e.g. Boersma & Hamann, 2008) put a strong emphasis on the functional bias and its role in language change. We base our investigations on the assumption that the role of social biases might play even a higher role in the formation and change of phonologically and phonetically driven sociolinguistic processes (Nettle, 1999; Coetzee & Pretorius, 2010)

Processing of inconsistent emotional information: an fMRI study

Previous studies investigating the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) have relied on a number of tasks which involved cognitive control and attentional demands. In this fMRI study, we tested the model that ACC functions as an attentional network in the processing of language. We employed a paradigm that requires the processing of concurrent linguistic information predicting that the cognitive costs imposed by competing trials would engender the activation of ACC. Subjects were confronted with sentences where the semantic content conflicted with the prosodic intonation (CONF condition) randomly interspaced with sentences which conveyed coherent discourse components (NOCONF condition). We observed the activation of the rostral ACC and the middle frontal gyrus when the NOCONF condition was subtracted from the CONF condition. Our findings provide evidence for the involvement of the rostral ACC in the processing of complex competing linguistic stimuli, supporting theories that claim its relevance as a part of the cortical attentional circuit. The processing of emotional prosody involved a bilateral network encompassing the superior and medial temporal cortices. This evidence confirms previous research investigating the neuronal network that supports the processing of emotional information

Phonological pivot parsing

There are two basic mysteries about natural language. The speed and ease with which it is acquired by a child and the speed and ease with which it is processed. Similarly to language acquisition, language processing faces a strong input-data-deficiency problem. When we speak we alter a great lot in the idealized phonological and phonetic representations. We delete whole phonemes, we radically change allophones, we shift stresses, we break up intonational patterns, we insert the pauses at the most unexpected places, etc. If to this crippled 'phonological string ' we add all the noise from the surroundings which does not help comprehension either, it is bewildering that the parser is supposed to recognize anything at all. However, even in the most difficult circumstances (foreig

Phonemic and Postural Effects on the Production of Prosody

Phonemic settings and the internal models that they represent are learned in the process of language and speech acquisition. Postural settings, in contrast, rely on continuous auditory monitoring and tend to break down quickly if this monitoring process is inhibited during speech production. Evidence presented in the literature seems to indicate that stable internal models are mostly associated with segmental phonemic targets, whereas prosodic features often display postural characteristics. In this paper it is argued that the dichotomy of phonemic and postural settings applies not only to segmental properties of speech but to prosodic features as well. Phonemic and postural effects on the production of prosody are reviewed and it is suggested that the boundary between phonemic and postural effects on a given prosodic feature is flexible. We further hypothesize that the speaker may rely on a set of acquired internal models and select from this set a particular model depending on communicative and situative constraints

Test Environment for the Two Level Model of Germanic Prominence

In this work we present a test bed designed to verify the two level model of Germanic prominence. We give an introduction to the linguistic background of the model and derive the features that the test environment should possess. Finally we describe the details of the implementation in the ESPS/xwaves 1 environment. The implementation is based on resynthesis using PSOLA algorithm. As a linguistic application the Tone Sequence Model (TSM) is implemented and tested. Keywords: Prosody, Modelling of F0, PSOLA, Tone-Sequence-Model (TSM). 1. LINGUISTIC-PHONETIC BACKGROUND Recent developments in the theory of prominence [1][3] rigorously restrict the number of categories upon which prominence relations may be expressed. Of the number of prosodic constituents proposed in the early 80s (see [4] for an overview) practically only two could be validated in experimental studies: the stress foot (the basic linguistic category at the level of word prosody [word stress]), and the intonational phra..

Towards a Model of Target Oriented Production of Prosody

A new paradigm for prosody research is presented, inspired by the speech production model recently proposed by Guenther, Perkell, and colleagues. This research paradigm aims at generalizing the production model by extending it from a predominantly segmental perspective to a new theory of the production of prosody. Speech movements in the prosodic domain are interpreted as intonational gestures that are planned to reach and traverse perceptual target regions. Evidence from F0 alignment studies suggests that the perceptual targets can be approximately represented by regions in a multidimensional acoustictemporal space. These studies also indicate that segmental, spectral, temporal, and prosodic structure are co-produced in such a way as to mutually support and enhance, and not impair, the perceptual targets. Furthermore, examples of multilevel mappings between invariant and variable targets in the domain of prosody are provided, and a dichotomy of phonemic and postural prosodic settings is discussed