Production, Perception, and Distribution of Breathy Sonorants in Marathi

Breathy sonorants are crosslinguistically rare, and while a small amount of existing work has focused on their acoustic properties much remains to be learned about their perception and their language-internal distribution. Herein, breathy sonorants in Marathi are investigated via instrumental acoustic analysis, a perception experiment, and corpus analysis. Results reveal that breathy sonorants are under-represented language-internally in addition to being typologically rare. The acoustic differences associated with sonorant phonation contrasts are less robust than those in obstruents. They are also prone to more perception errors than obstruents, and breathy sonorants are more heavily restricted phonotactically than breathy obstruents. These data contribute to a more nuanced understanding of breathy sonorants, and lend potential insight into their typology.

A production modeling approach to the assessment of the horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) population in Delaware Bay

Horseshoe crab (Limulus polyphemus) is harvested commercially, used by the biomedical industry, and provides food for migrating shorebirds, particularly in Delaware Bay. Recently, decreasing crab population trends in this region have raised concerns that the stock may be insufficient to fulfill the needs of these diverse user groups. To assess the Delaware Bay horseshoe crab population, we used surplus production models (programmed in ASPIC), which incorporated data from fishery-independent surveys, fishery-dependent catch-per-unit-of-effort data, and regional harvest. Results showed a depleted population (B2003/=0.03−0.71) BMSY and high relative fishing mortality /FMSY=0.9−9.5). Future harvest (F2002strategies for a 15-year period were evaluated by using population projections with ASPICP software. Under 2003 harvest levels (1356 t), population recovery to BMSY would take at least four years, and four of the seven models predicted that the population would not reach BMSY within the 15year period. Production models for horseshoe crab assessment provided management benchmarks for a species with limited data and no prior stock assessmen

Phonation Types in Marathi: An Acoustic Investigation

This dissertation presents a comprehensive instrumental acoustic analysis of phonation type distinctions in Marathi, an Indic language with numerous breathy voiced sonorants and obstruents. Important new facts about breathy voiced sonorants, which are crosslinguistically rare, are established: male and female speakers cue breathy phonation in sonorants differently, there are an abundance of trading relations, and--critically--phonation type distinctions are not cued as well by sonorants as by obstruents. Ten native speakers (five male, five female) were recorded producing Marathi words embedded in a carrier sentence. Tokens included plain and breathy voiced stops, affricates, nasals, laterals, rhotics, and approximants before the vowels [a] and [e]. Measures reported for consonants and subsequent vowels include duration, F0, Cepstral Peak Prominence (CPP), and corrected H1-H2*, H1-A1*, H1-A2*, and H1-A3* values. As expected, breathy voice is associated with decreased CPP and increased spectral values. A strong gender difference is revealed: low-frequency measures like H1-H2* cue breathy phonation more reliably in male speech, while CPP--which provides information about the aspiration noise included in the signal--is a more reliable cue in female speech. Trading relations are also reported: time and again, where one cue is weak or absent another cue is strong or present, underscoring the importance of including both genders and multiple vowel contexts when testing phonation type differences. Overall, the cues that are present for obstruents are not necessarily mirrored by sonorants. These findings are interpreted with reference to Dispersion Theory (Flemming 1995; Liljencrants & Lindblom 1972; Lindblom 1986, 1990). While various incarnations of Dispersion Theory focus on different aspects of perceptual and auditory distinctiveness, a basic claim is that one requirement for phonological contrasts is that they must be perceptually distinct: contrasts that are subject to great confusability are phonologically disfavored. The proposal, then, is that the typology of breathy voiced sonorants is due in part to the fact that they are not well differentiated acoustically. Breathy voiced sonorants are crosslinguistically rare because they do not make for strong phonemic contrasts

Capturing Breathy Voice: Durational Measures of Oral Stops in Marathi

The present study investigates a series of techniques used to capture the durational differences of oral stops in Marathi, an Indic language that exhibits a four-way phonemic distinction among oral stops

The Nature of Optional Sibilant Harmony in Navajo

This thesis represents investigates optional sibilant harmony in Navajo using the first person possessive morpheme, which contains an underlyingly palatal sibilant that may harmonize to alveolar when affixed to noun stems that contain [+anterior] sibilants. The literature commonly describes sibilant harmony as being mandatory in Navajo when sibilants are in adjacent syllables, and optional when there is more distance between sibilants. In other words, sibilant disharmony is ungrammatical, but gradiently rather than categorically; in some instances disharmony is ungrammatical enough that it must be repaired through assimilation, while in other instances it is less ungrammatical and may be tolerated. The statistical nature of the variation in these optional harmony settings is not fully understood, however, and the three studies contained within this thesis were designed to investigate how often assimilation occurs in nonmandatory environments and to identify factors that contribute to the variability observed. In the first study, a Google search was used to evaluate sibilant harmony in online Navajo language use in the Spring of 2008 and again in the Spring of 2010. The findings present a picture of optional sibilant harmony that differs somewhat from the traditional view; harmony seems to be optional even in the environment that has traditionally been described as mandatory, and it occurs far less frequently than anticipated. These results led to the creation of an online survey wherein fluent speakers of Navajo provided grammaticality judgments of both assimilated and unassimilated forms. Almost universally, respondents preferred the unassimilated shi- even in those environments where assimilation would previously have been considered mandatory. The third study involved the recording of data from three speakers of Navajo, none of whom use the assimilated si- either in writing or in speech--at least, not to a degree that is discernible to the naked ear. Acoustic analysis was performed to determine whether the prefix-initial palatal sibilant is acoustically consistent across the board--duration, spectral mean, onset of frication energy, and the second formant of the following vowel were measured to investigate whether the prefixal esh differs acoustically when it appears before words that contain potential triggers than when it does not. Analysis reveals some differences in the spectral mean and duration of the fricative portion of the first person possessive morpheme when it occurs before stems that contain [+anterior] sibilants. Taken together, the findings presented herein suggest that the mandatory sibilant harmony environment no longer exists in Navajo, at least with regards to the first person possessive morpheme. Harmony is far less prevalent than expected overall, and is wholly absent for some speakers. The factors of continuancy and adjacency were found to contribute significantly to the gradience observed in all three studies, however, even for those speakers who do not overtly use assimilation

Perception of Breathy Phonation in Gujarati

The correlates of breathiness are similar across consonants and vowels, raising a question about whether breathy consonant/breathy vowel contrasts are confusable in languages with both, e.g. Gujarati. We investigate the perception of phonemically breathy Cs and Vs in Gujarati via three tasks: free-sort, AX discrimination, and picture-matching identification. Results from six native listeners indicate that breathiness is indeed confusable: participants reliably identify the presence of breathiness if the acoustic correlates thereof are strong enough, but cannot reliably assign it to the appropriate segment (consonant or vowel), rendering it difficult to distinguish CɦV from CV̤ .

Evaluating Educational Interventions in Emergency Medicine

This article presents the proceedings of the 2012 Academic Emergency Medicine consensus conference breakout group charged with identifying areas necessary for future research regarding effectiveness of educational interventions for teaching emergency medicine ( EM ) knowledge, skills, and attitudes outside of the clinical setting. The objective was to summarize both medical and nonmedical education literature and report the consensus formation methods and results. The authors present final statements to guide future research aimed at evaluating the best methods for understanding and developing successful EM curricula using all types of educational interventions.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/94811/1/acem12022.pd

Theory and description in African Linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics

The papers in this volume were presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2016. The papers offer new descriptions of African languages and propose novel theoretical analyses of them. The contributions span topics in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa. Four papers in the volume examine Areal Features and Linguistic Reconstruction in Africa, and were presented at a special workshop on this topic held alongside the general session of ACAL

Theory and description in African Linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics

The papers in this volume were presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2016. The papers offer new descriptions of African languages and propose novel theoretical analyses of them. The contributions span topics in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa. Four papers in the volume examine Areal Features and Linguistic Reconstruction in Africa, and were presented at a special workshop on this topic held alongside the general session of ACAL

Theory and description in African Linguistics: Selected papers from the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics

The papers in this volume were presented at the 47th Annual Conference on African Linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2016. The papers offer new descriptions of African languages and propose novel theoretical analyses of them. The contributions span topics in phonetics, phonology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics and reflect the typological and genetic diversity of languages in Africa. Four papers in the volume examine Areal Features and Linguistic Reconstruction in Africa, and were presented at a special workshop on this topic held alongside the general session of ACAL