Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Non-Prompted Speech

A reliable method for automatic phonetic transcription of non− prompted German speech has been developed at th

A mathematical model of speech aerodynamics

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Experimental Phonology

Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 207-22

The Story of [w]: An Exercise in the Phonetic Explanation for Sound Patterns

Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1977), pp. 577-59

Utterance Selection Model of Language Change

We present a mathematical formulation of a theory of language change. The theory is evolutionary in nature and has close analogies with theories of population genetics. The mathematical structure we construct similarly has correspondences with the Fisher-Wright model of population genetics, but there are significant differences. The continuous time formulation of the model is expressed in terms of a Fokker-Planck equation. This equation is exactly soluble in the case of a single speaker and can be investigated analytically in the case of multiple speakers who communicate equally with all other speakers and give their utterances equal weight. Whilst the stationary properties of this system have much in common with the single-speaker case, time-dependent properties are richer. In the particular case where linguistic forms can become extinct, we find that the presence of many speakers causes a two-stage relaxation, the first being a common marginal distribution that persists for a long time as a consequence of ultimate extinction being due to rare fluctuations.Comment: 21 pages, 17 figure

F2 slope as a perceptual cue for the front-back contrast in Standard Southern British English

Acoustic studies of several languages indicate that second-formant (F2) slopes in high vowels have opposing directions (independent of consonantal context): front [iː]-like vowels are produced with a rising F2 slope while back [uː]-like vowels are produced with a falling F2 slope. The present study first reports acoustic measurements that confirm this pattern for the English variety of Standard Southern British English (SSBE), where /uː/ has shifted from the back to the front area of the vowel space and is now realized with higher midpoint F2 values than several decades ago. Subsequently, we test whether the direction of F2 slope also serves as a reliable cue to the /iː/-/uː/ contrast in perception. The findings show that F2 slope direction is used as a cue (additional to midpoint formant values) to distinguish /iː/ from /uː/ by both young and older SSBE listeners: an otherwise ambiguous token is identified as /iː/ if it has a rising F2 slope and as /uː/ if it has a falling F2 slope. Furthermore, our results indicate that listeners generalize their reliance on F2 slope to other contrasts, namely /ɛ/-/ɒ/ and /æ/-/ɒ/, even though F2 slope is not employed to differentiate these vowels in production. This suggests that in SSBE, a rising F2 seems to be perceptually associated with an abstract feature such as [+front] while a falling F2 with an abstract feature such as [-front]