Intrinsic f0 and Sound Change: Evidence from Australian Languages

In this paper, a study is presented investigating two types of intrinsic f0 effects in sixteen Australian languages. Vowels are known to vary systematically in their mean f0 as a function of vowel height as well as voicing of the previous consonant, a property known as intrinsic f0. Vowel height has been known to have a positive correlation with f0, in which high vowels have a higher intrinsic f0 than low vowels on average. Differences in intrinsic f0 also vary systematically based on the voicing of a preceding stop, with voiceless stops correlating with higher intrinsic f0 and voiced stops with lower. Using automatic data processing methods on archival audio data, this study shows wide variation in the presence and robustness of intrinsic f0 effects in the Australian langauges investigated

Archival Phonetics & Prosodic Typology in Sixteen Australian Languages

In naturalistic speech, the phonetic instantiation of phonological categories is often highly variable. Speakers have been observed to converge on patterns of phonetic variation that are consistent within languages but variable cross-linguistically for the same phonological phenomenon. Speakers are evidently sensitive to these sorts of patterns and learn the phonetic variation in a consistent way. Furthermore, the systematicity of this variation suggests that these patterns should change over time systematically as well. Most Australian languages assign lexical stress consistently on the first syllable of the word, raising the question of how the phonetics of stress varies across languages with this phonologically stable pattern. This dissertation presents an investigation into structured variation of the acoustic correlates of stress and prosody in sixteen Indigenous languages of Australia that all have consistent initial stress placement, with a focus on the source(s) of variation in these factors cross-linguistically. Acoustic correlates of stress, despite the phonological uniformity present among these languages, show significant cross-linguistic variation, both in the presence or absence of a particular cue to stress, as well as the size of these effects. The phonological uniformity of stress assignment allows for a more controlled comparison of the acoustic correlates of stress across these languages, since the placement of stress marking remains constant. Acoustic correlates investigated are vowel duration, pre-tonic and post-tonic consonant duration, intensity, f0 (maximum and range), and vowel peripherality. These cues are identified using a series of mixed effects linear regression models. To identify the source(s) of variation in acoustic correlates to stress, the population genetics tool Analysis of Molecular Variance (AMOVA) is used. This is a statistical tool created for analysis of genetic variance that has been applied to cultural evolution topics such as music and folktales. This model finds significant variation across languages, as well as substantial intra-speaker variation, similarly to the findings for both biological and cultural evolution, but no significant intra-language variation across speakers. These results are also supported by the investigation of inter- and intra-language variation using regresssion modeling. Another population genetics measure, fixation index, is used to create a network model of language relationships based on the phonetic correlates of lexical stress. This network shows clear relationships between the Pama Nyungan languages in this sample, as well as some Gunwinyguan languages, supporting the claim that the phonetic cues to stress are stable within language families and change according to the principles of diachronic language change. Smaller groupings in this network also indicate some contact-induced change or areal effects in these phonetic markers. Phrasal prosody is also investigated in this dissertation, using a toolkit for automated phrasal contour clustering. For each language, f0 is measured at regular intervals across the word, which is used as input to a complete-linkage clustering algorithm to identify major categories of phrasal contours. Results of this sort of automatic clustering provide testable hypotheses about phrasal types in each language, while avoiding some common pitfalls of impressionistic analyses of prosodic phrases. As with the investigation into lexical stress, this sort of automated typological work serves as a crucial complement to more detailed language-specific studies for the creation of well-rounded and well-supported theories. The data used in this dissertation are narrative speech recordings sourced from language archives, collected in varying field settings. In processing these data I have created a large corpus of these recordings force aligned at the segment level and have worked out post-hoc methods for controlling noise and variation in field-collected audio to create a comparable set of language data. I include in the dissertation a lengthy discussion of these methods, with the aim of providing a practical toolkit for the use of archival materials to address novel phonetic questions, as well as to aid in the creation of language revitalization resources

Reading the Arabic Qur’an in Early Modern Europe

Intet resum

Quadexciton cascade and fine structure splitting of the triexciton in a single quantum dot

We report the properties of emission lines associated with the cascaded recombination of a quadexciton in single GaAlAs/AlAs quantum dots, studied by means of polarization-resolved photoluminescence and single-photon correlation experiments. It is found that photons which are emitted in a double-step 4X-3X process preserve their linear polarization, similarly to the case of conserved polarization of correlated photons in the 2X-X cascade. In contrast, an emission of either co-linear or cross-linear pairs of photons is observed for the 3X-2X cascade. Each emission line associated with the quadexciton cascade shows doublet structure in the polarization-resolved photoluminescence experiment. The maximum splitting is seen when the polarization axis is chosen along and perpendicular to the [110] crystallographic direction. This effect is ascribed to the fine structure splitting of the exciton and triexciton states in the presence of an anisotropic confining potential of ae dot. We also show that the splitting in the triexciton state surpasses that in the exciton state by a factor up to eight and their ratio scales with the energy distance between the 3X and X emission lines, thus, very likely, with a lateral size and/or a composition of the dot.Comment: submitted to Physical Review

Automatic categorization of prosodic contours in Bardi

This study presents preliminary results of an automated prosodic clustering analysis of Bardi, a Nyulnyulan language from Northern Australia, using methods from Kaland (2021). Previous work on Bardi prosody identified several functions of boundary tones and two main phrase types, but stressed that findings were preliminary. Here we extend that work and show evidence for several additional phrase types, as well as confirming the overall accuracy of automated clustering. This work adds to the prosodic typology of Australian languages (cf. Fletcher et al. 2002) and provides further evidence for the functions of intonation beyond demarcation in these languages. When coupled with evaluation by a knowledgeable researcher, this automated approach can greatly expedite prosodic analysis on a large scale and expand our typology of prosodic systems

Editorial Board Vol. 1 No. 1 (2023)

masthea

Optical readout of charge and spin in a self-assembled quantum dot in a strong magnetic field

We present a theory and experiment demonstrating optical readout of charge and spin in a single InAs/GaAs self-assembled quantum dot. By applying a magnetic field we create the filling factor 2 quantum Hall singlet phase of the charged exciton. Increasing or decreasing the magnetic field leads to electronic spin-flip transitions and increasing spin polarization. The increasing total spin of electrons appears as a manifold of closely spaced emission lines, while spin flips appear as discontinuities of emission lines. The number of multiplets and discontinuities measures the number of carriers and their spin. We present a complete analysis of the emission spectrum of a single quantum dot with N=4 electrons and a single hole, calculated and measured in magnetic fields up to 23 Tesla.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Europhysics Letter