Automatic recognition of schwa variants in spontaneous Hungarian speech

This paper analyzes the nature of the process involved in optional vowel reduction in Hungarian, and the acoustic structure of schwa variants in spontaneous speech. The study focuses on the acoustic patterns of both the basic realizations of Hungarian vowels and their realizations as neutral vowels (schwas), as well as on the design, implementation, and evaluation of a set of algorithms for the recognition of both types of realizations from the speech waveform. The authors address the question whether schwas form a unified group of vowels or they show some dependence on the originally intended articulation of the vowel they stand for. The acoustic study uses a database consisting of over 4,000 utterances extracted from continuous speech, and recorded from 19 speakers. The authors propose methods for the recognition of neutral vowels depending on the various vowels they replace in spontaneous speech. Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients are calculated and used for the training of Hidden Markov Models. The recognition system was trained on 2,500 utterances and then tested on 1,500 utterances. The results show that a neutral vowel can be detected in 72% of all occurrences. Stressed and unstressed syllables can be distinguished in 92% of all cases. Neutralized vowels do not form a unified group of phoneme realizations. The pronunciation of schwa heavily depends on the original articulation configuration of the intended vowel

Dynamic Models of Language Evolution: The Linguistic Perspective

Language is probably the key defining characteristic of humanity, an immensely powerful tool which provides its users with an infinitely expressive means of representing their complex thoughts and reflections, and of successfully communicating them to others. It is the foundation on which human societies have been built and the means through which humanity’s unparalleled intellectual and technological achievements have been realized. Although we have a natural intuitive understanding of what a language is, the specification of a particular language is nevertheless remarkably difficult, if not impossible, to pin down precisely. All languages contain many separate yet integral systems which work interdependently to allow the expression of our thoughts and the interpretation of others’ expressions: each has, for instance, a set of basic meaningless sounds (e.g. [e], [l], [s]) which can be combined to make different meaningful words and parts of words (e.g. else, less, sell, -less ); these meaningful units can be combined to make complex words (e.g. spinelessness, selling ), and the words themselves can then be combined in very many complex ways into phrases, clauses and an infinite number of meaningful sentences; finally each of these sentences can be interpreted in dramatically different ways, depending on the contexts in which it is uttered and on who is doing the interpretation. Languages can be analysed at any of these different levels, which make up many of the sub-fields of linguistics, and the primary job of linguistic theorists is to try to explain the rules which best explain these complex combinations

Household expansion linked to agricultural intensification during emergence of Hawaiian archaic states

The Leeward Kohala Field System (LKFS) covering ∼60 km2 on Hawai‘i Island is one of the world's best-studied archaeological examples of preindustrial agricultural intensification. Archaeological correlates for households over a 400-y period of intensification of the LKFS (A.D. 1400–1800) indicate that household age, number, and distribution closely match the expansion of agricultural features at both macro- and microscales. We excavated and dated residential complexes within portions of five traditional Hawaiian land units (ahupua‘a), two in the central core of the field system and three in the southern margins. Forty-eight radiocarbon dates from 43 residential features indicate an overall pattern of exponential increase in the numbers of households over time. Spatial distribution of these dates suggests that the core of the LKFS may have reached a population saturation point earlier than in the southern margins. Bayesian statistical analysis of radiocarbon dates from residential features in the core region, combined with spatial analysis of agricultural and residential construction sequences, demonstrates that the progressive subdivision of territories into smaller socioeconomic units was matched by addition of new residences, probably through a process of household fissioning. These results provide insights into the economic processes underlying the sociopolitical transformation from chiefdom to archaic state in precontact Hawai‘i