Blackfoot Final Vowels: What Variation and its Absence can Tell us about Communicative Goals

This paper investigates variation in the production of word-final vowels in Blackfoot, an Algonquian language spoken by approximately 3350 people in Southern Alberta and Northern Montana. The Blackfoot community perceives the language as partitioning into varieties, based on the age of the speaker; ‘old Blackfoot’ is richly polysynthetic and spoken by people born in the 1930s and earlier, whereas ‘new Blackfoot’ is thought to be missing certain inflections, and is spoken by people born in the 1940s or later. Final vowels, which encode a morphosyntactic distinction referred to as obviation, are thought to be particularly susceptible to language loss. Gick et al. (2012) document the phonetic properties of one Blackfoot speaker’s final vowels, demonstrating that, for her, final vowels are not absent but instead soundless in some environments, in that there are distinct articulator positions for -a and -i vowels without any corresponding acoustic distinction. We investigate the articulatory, acoustic, and phonological properties of the final vowels of four additional speakers cross-cutting age, dialect, and gender. Using ultrasound, video, and audio recordings, we found that while there is phonetic variation across speakers in the realization of final vowels, not one speaker altogether omits them. In short, there is variation, but of a limited nature. The robustness of the final vowels reflects the fact that they serve an important communicative function in the grammar by encoding obviation

Seeing Speech: A Pronunciation Toolkit for Indigenous Language Teaching and Learning

Pronunciation can present a serious challenge for language teachers and learners (e.g., Munro & Derwing 2015). In the context of Indigenous languages in particular, this can be compounded by a number of factors, including small numbers of speakers and teachers, a paucity of pedagogical resources and clear descriptions of sound systems, and the pressures faced by heritage learners to authentically preserve their ancestral language (Carpenter 1997; Hinton 2011; Hinton & Ahlers 1999). Latent speakers may be inhibited from speaking by perceived concerns over their pronunciation, particularly in the presence of elders (Basham & Fatham 2008), and other learners may face similar social and linguistic challenges. Despite these hurdles, pronunciation is considered by many to be an important aspect of Indigenous language learning, and one which requires creative community-oriented solutions (AUTHOR & Kell 2015; Carpenter 1997). Towards this end, we have developed a pronunciationlearning toolthat incorporates ultrasound technology, giving learners a visual aid to help them learn to articulate challenging or unfamiliar sounds, for example “back of the mouth” consonants (e.g. /k/ vs. /q/). Ultrasound is used to create videos of a model speaker’s tongue movements during speech, which are then overlaid on videos of an external profile view of the model’s head to create ultrasound-enhanced pronunciation videos for individual words or sounds (Abel et al. 2015). A key advantage of these videos is that they allow learners direct access to the articulatory shapes and movements that are involved in pronouncing challenging words or sounds; learners are able see how speech is produced rather than just hear and try to mimic it. Although ultrasound-enhanced videos were originally developed for commonly taught languages such as Japanese and French, there has been widespread interest from Indigenous communities in Western Canada to develop their own customized videos. To date, we have partnered with communities in Alberta and British Columbia to develop videos for four languages: SENĆOŦEN, Secwepemc, Halq’emeylem, and Blackfoot. Community-driven and capacity-building, these projects involved training community members in how to produce customized ultrasound-enhanced videos using our toolkit. The resulting videos will be featured in our presentation, along with demonstrations of how and why to use ultrasound in pronunciation teaching. Our goal is to show that the ultrasound-enhanced videos can help to address some of the challenges of pronunciation learning in Indigenous languages by giving learners a new way to understand pronunciation that focuses on seeing speech. References Abel, J., B. Allen, S. Burton, M. Kazama, M. Noguchi, A. Tsuda, N. Yamane, & AUTHOR. 2015. Ultrasound-Enhanced Multimodal Approaches to Pronunciation Teaching and Learning. Canadian Acoustics 43 (3), 130-131. Basham, C. and A. Fathman. 2008. The latent speaker: Attaining adult fluency in an endangered language. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 11: 577-97. AUTHOR and S. Kell. Pronunciation in the context of language revitalization. Paper presented at ICLDC 4, 2015. Carpenter, V. 1997. Teaching Children to "Unlearn" the Sounds of English. In Teaching Indigenous Languages, ed. by Jon Reyhner. Flagstaff, AZ: Northern Arizona University, pp. 31-39. Hinton, L. 2011. Language revitalization and language pedagogy: New teaching and learning strategies. Language and Education 25(4): 307-318, Hinton, L. and J. Ahlers. 1999. The issue of “authenticity” in California language restoration. Anthropology & Education Quarterly, 30: 56-67. Munro, M. J. & Derwing, T. M. 2015. A prospectus for pronunciation research in the 21st century: A point of view. Journal of Second Language Pronunciation 1(1): 11-42

Drought and Land-Cover Conditions in the Great Plains

Land–atmosphere interactions play a critical role in the Earth system, and a better understanding of these interactions could improve weather and climate models. The interaction among drought, vegetation productivity, and land cover is of particular significance. In a semiarid environment, such as the U.S. Great Plains, droughts can have a large influence on the productivity of agriculture and grasslands, with serious environmental and economic impacts. Here, we used the vegetation drought response index (VegDRI) drought indicator to investigate the response of vegetation to weather and climate for landcover types in the Great Plains in the United States from 1989 to 2012. We found that analysis that focused on land-cover types within ecoregion divisions provided substantially more and land-cover-based detail on the timing and intensity of drought than did summarizing across the entire Great Plains region. In the northern Great Plains, VegDRI measured more frequent drought impacts on vegetation in the western ecoregions than in the eastern ecoregions. Across the ecoregions of the Great Plains, drought impacts on vegetation were more commonly found in grassland than in cropland. For example, in the ‘‘Northwestern Great Plains’’ ecoregion (which encompasses areas of Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska), grassland and nonirrigated cropland were observed in VegDRI to have historical fractional drought coverages in the growing season of 17% and 11%, respectively. Includes supplemental materia

Drought and Land-Cover Conditions in the Great Plains

Land–atmosphere interactions play a critical role in the Earth system, and a better understanding of these interactions could improve weather and climate models. The interaction among drought, vegetation productivity, and land cover is of particular significance. In a semiarid environment, such as the U.S. Great Plains, droughts can have a large influence on the productivity of agriculture and grasslands, with serious environmental and economic impacts. Here, we used the vegetation drought response index (VegDRI) drought indicator to investigate the response of vegetation to weather and climate for landcover types in the Great Plains in the United States from 1989 to 2012. We found that analysis that focused on land-cover types within ecoregion divisions provided substantially more and land-cover-based detail on the timing and intensity of drought than did summarizing across the entire Great Plains region. In the northern Great Plains, VegDRI measured more frequent drought impacts on vegetation in the western ecoregions than in the eastern ecoregions. Across the ecoregions of the Great Plains, drought impacts on vegetation were more commonly found in grassland than in cropland. For example, in the ‘‘Northwestern Great Plains’’ ecoregion (which encompasses areas of Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska), grassland and nonirrigated cropland were observed in VegDRI to have historical fractional drought coverages in the growing season of 17% and 11%, respectively

Seeing Speech: Ultrasound-based Multimedia Resources for Pronunciation Learning in Indigenous Languages

Pronunciation is an important aspect of Indigenous language learning, and one which requires creative community-oriented solutions. Towards this end, we have developed a pronunciation learning tool that incorporates ultrasound technology to give learners a visual aid to help them articulate unfamiliar and/or challenging sounds. Ultrasound is used to create videos of a model speaker’s tongue movements during speech, which are then overlaid on videos of an external profile view of the model’s head to create ultrasound-enhanced pronunciation videos for individual words or sounds. A key advantage of these videos is that learners are able see how speech is produced rather than just hear and try to mimic it. Although ultrasound-enhanced videos were originally developed for commonly taught languages such as Japanese and French, there has been widespread interest from Indigenous communities in Western Canada to develop their own customized videos. This paper reports on three collaborations between linguists and communities in British Columbia to develop ultrasound-enhanced videos for the SENĆOŦEN, Secwepemc, and Halq’emeylem languages. These videos can give learners a new way to learn pronunciation that focuses on seeing speech, and can create new documentation of understudied sound systems for future generations.National Foreign Language Resource Cente

Miscarriage and stillbirth following maternal Zika virus infection in nonhuman primates.

Zika virus (ZIKV) infection is associated with congenital defects and pregnancy loss. Here, we found that 26% of nonhuman primates infected with Asian/American ZIKV in early gestation experienced fetal demise later in pregnancy despite showing few clinical signs of infection. Pregnancy loss due to asymptomatic ZIKV infection may therefore be a common but under-recognized adverse outcome related to maternal ZIKV infection

Demonstratives in discourse

This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives

Demonstratives in discourse

This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives

Demonstratives in discourse

This volume explores the use of demonstratives in the structuring and management of discourse, and their role as engagement expressions, from a crosslinguistic perspective. It seeks to establish which types of discourse-related functions are commonly encoded by demonstratives, beyond the well-established reference-tracking and deictic uses, and also investigates which members of demonstrative paradigms typically take on certain functions. Moreover, it looks at the roles of non-deictic demonstratives, that is, members of the paradigm which are dedicated e.g. to contrastive, recognitional, or anaphoric functions and do not express deictic distinctions. Several of the studies also focus on manner demonstratives, which have been little studied from a crosslinguistic perspective. The volume thus broadens the scope of investigation of demonstratives to look at how their core functions interact with a wider range of discourse functions in a number of different languages. The volume covers languages from a range of geographical locations and language families, including Cushitic and Mande languages in Africa, Oceanic and Papuan languages in the Pacific region, Algonquian and Guaykuruan in the Americas, and Germanic, Slavic and Finno-Ugric languages in the Eurasian region. It also includes two papers taking a broader typological approach to specific discourse functions of demonstratives