When is a Syllable not a Syllable?

This paper reviews evidence for unifying two seemingly disparate types of syllable reduction phenomena: the elision of reduced vowels in English and German, and the devocalization of high vowels in Japanese, Korean, and Montreal French. Both types of "casual speech rule" can be understood as extreme endpoints of a phonetic continuum of gestural overlap. The vowel is seemingly deleted or devoiced when the gestures of neighboring consonants encroach so completely into the space for the affected vowel that the relevant vowel gesture(s) leave no salient acoustic trace. However, in some cases in some of these languages, the reduction has been phonologically reanalyzed, so that the word loses a syllable. The paper explores the circumstances under which such reanalysis can occur

State Charities Regulation In A Dynamic Health Care Market

Under the common law in most jurisdictions, the attorney general as charities regulator is mandated to oversee the due application of charitable funds and to ensure that directors, trustees and other fiduciaries of public charities fulfill their fiduciary duties. In the health care context, attorneys general have been called upon most prominently in recent years to apply charities law in proposed “conversions” of charitable health care entities to for-profit ownership and operation. In addition, questions have been raised as to the consistency of certain compensation arrangements with the due application of charitable funds and with fulfillment of fiduciary duties. For example, high executive or physician compensation packages have been questioned as potentially inconsistent with fiduciary duties owed by the executives and the board members approving such arrangements. Compensation and other arrangements between and among charitable health care entities have also been questioned as to whether they violate fiduciary duties. Business conduct of some health care charities has been questioned as to whether it is somehow inconsistent with charitable status or violates a duty to charitable mission

Production and perception of individual speaking styles

As explanation of between-speaker differences in speech production moves beyond sex-and age-related differences in physiology, discussion has focused on individual vocal tract morphology. While it is interesting to relate, say, variable recruitment of the jaw to extent of palate doming, there is a substantial residue of arbitrary differences that constitute the speaker's "style". Style differences observed across a well-defined social group indicate group membership. Other style differences are idiosyncratic "habits" of articulation, individual solutions to the many-to-many mapping between motoric and acoustic representations and to the many different attentional trading relationships that can exploit the typical patterns of redundant variation in independent acoustic correlates of any minimal contrast. Perceptual studies of social style differences suggest that perceptibility depends upon the task and upon the hearer's own group membership. The few studies of idiosyncratic differences suggest that speakers perceive each others' productions in terms of their own habits. Thus, perceptual compensation for speaker differences must go beyond mere vocal tract normalization. A promising route for describing how listeners compensate for the arbitrary variation of style is an instance-based (or exemplar) model of speech perception in which the distribution of exemplars is heavily weighted by instances of the speaker's own productions

Summer Service Learning — What Distinguishes Students Who Choose to Participate from Those Who Do Not? Part One: Religion, Parents, and Social Awareness

Since 1980, 2455 Notre Dame students have participated in the Center for Social Concerns’ Summer Service Project Internship (SSPI), previously referred to as the Summer Service Program, or SSP. Currently, over 200 students choose this experience yearly. These students spend eight weeks working with disadvantaged populations during the summer, as part of a three-credit course. Students have volunteered in homeless shelters, hospitals, soup kitchens, day care centers, schools, and boys and girls clubs in more than 300 cities since the beginning of the program two decades ago

Tagging Prosody and Discourse Structure in Elicited Spontaneous Speech

This paper motivates and describes the annotation and analysis of prosody and discourse structure for several large spoken language corpora. The annotation schema are of two types: tags for prosody and intonation, and tags for several aspects of discourse structure. The choice of the particular tagging schema in each domain is based in large part on the insights they provide in corpus-based studies of the relationship between discourse structure and the accenting of referring expressions in American English. We first describe these results and show that the same models account for the accenting of pronouns in an extended passage from one of the Speech Warehouse hotel-booking dialogues. We then turn to corpora described in Venditti [Ven00], which adapts the same models to Tokyo Japanese. Japanese is interesting to compare to English, because accent is lexically specified and so cannot mark discourse focus in the same way. Analyses of these corpora show that local pitch range expansion serves the analogous focusing function in Japanese. The paper concludes with a section describing several outstanding questions in the annotation of Japanese intonation which corpus studies can help to resolve.Work reported in this paper was supported in part by a grant from the Ohio State University Office of Research, to Mary E. Beckman and co-principal investigators on the OSU Speech Warehouse project, and by an Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship to Jennifer J. Venditti

Agriculture in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership: Tariffs, Tariff-Rate Quotas, and Non-Tariff Measures

This study assesses the potential effects of the U.S.-EU Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership on agriculture under three broad scenarios: complete removal of tariffs and tariff-rate quotas; elimination of non-tariff measures along with tariffs and tariff-rate quotas; and a lowering of the willingness of consumers to purchase imported goods previously limited by non-tariff measures

Chapter 2: The Original ToBI System and the Evolution of the ToBI Framework

In this chapter, the authors will try to identify the essential properties of a ToBI framework annotation system by describing the development and design of the original ToBI conventions. In this description, the authors will overview the general phonological theory and the specific theory of Mainstream American English intonation and prosody that the authors decided to incorporate in the original ToBI tags. The authors will also state the practical principles that led us to make the decisions that the authors did. The chapter is organised as follows. Section 2.2 briefly chronicles how the MAE_ToBI system came into being. Section 2.3 briefly describes the consensus account of English intonation and prosody on which the MAE_ToBI system is based. Section 2.4 catalogues the different components of a MAE_ToBI transcription and lists the salient rules which constrain the relationships between different components. This section also expands upon the theoretical foundations and practical consequences of adopting the general structure of multiple labelling tiers, and particularly the separation of the labels for tones from the labels for indexing prosodic boundary strength. Section 2.5 then describes some of the extensions of the basic ToBI tiers that have been adopted by some sites. This section also compares our decisions about the number of tiers and about inter-tier constraints with the analogous decisions for some of the other ToBI systems described in this book. Section 2.6 discusses the status of the symbolic labels relative to the continuous phonetic records that are also an obligatory component of the MAE_ToBI transcription. Section 2.7 then closes by listing several open research questions that the authors would like to see addressed by MAE_ToBI users and the larger ToBI community