Why Make Life Hard? Resolutions to Problems of Rare and Difficult Sound Types

Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetics and Phonological Universals (1998

The Frequency of Tones

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Articulatory Phonology and Sukuma "Aspirated Nasals"

Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: Special Session on African Language Structures (1991), pp. 145-15

Phonetics in the Field

it seems generally the case that little detail on specifically phonetic matters is provided in a typical grammar, nor is there much use of phonetic techniques to provide insights on other matters, such as adding precision to observations of phonological alternations or testing whether supposed syntactic ambiguities are actually disambiguated at the phonetic level. While syntactic patterns are documented with example sentences, often from natural discourse or texts, the phonetic facts are rarely if ever documented by the presentation of hard evidence. In order to see if this impression was justified a survey of twenty grammars published or submitted as doctoral dissertations in the period of a dozen years from 1989 to 2000 was conducted

On the universal structure of human lexical semantics

How universal is human conceptual structure? The way concepts are organized in the human brain may reflect distinct features of cultural, historical, and environmental background in addition to properties universal to human cognition. Semantics, or meaning expressed through language, provides direct access to the underlying conceptual structure, but meaning is notoriously difficult to measure, let alone parameterize. Here we provide an empirical measure of semantic proximity between concepts using cross-linguistic dictionaries. Across languages carefully selected from a phylogenetically and geographically stratified sample of genera, translations of words reveal cases where a particular language uses a single polysemous word to express concepts represented by distinct words in another. We use the frequency of polysemies linking two concepts as a measure of their semantic proximity, and represent the pattern of such linkages by a weighted network. This network is highly uneven and fragmented: certain concepts are far more prone to polysemy than others, and there emerge naturally interpretable clusters loosely connected to each other. Statistical analysis shows such structural properties are consistent across different language groups, largely independent of geography, environment, and literacy. It is therefore possible to conclude the conceptual structure connecting basic vocabulary studied is primarily due to universal features of human cognition and language use.Comment: Press embargo in place until publicatio

Apical and Laminal Articulations in Hakha Lai

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Demonstrating environmental impacts on the sound structure of languages: challenges and solutions

Recent research has suggested that there are significant associations between aspects of the phonological properties of languages and the locations in which they are spoken. In this paper we outline a strategy for assembling maximally reliable and well documented climatic and environmental data to place in juxtaposition with carefully curated linguistic information on both language location and structure. Problems with temperature records are specifically highlighted as an illustration of the use of the platform and considerations when selecting environmental data for analytic use. Preliminary analyses suggest that certain previously proposed language-environment relationships are statistically valid, but that these may be better placed in a broader framework of language types

Phonological Factors Affecting L1 Phonetic Realization of Proficient Polish Users of English

Acoustic phonetic studies examine the L1 of Polish speakers with professional level proficiency in English. The studies include two tasks, a production task carried out entirely in Polish and a phonetic code-switching task in which speakers insert target Polish words or phrases into an English carrier. Additionally, two phonetic parameters are studied: the oft-investigated VOT, as well as glottalization vs. sandhi linking of word-initial vowels. In monolingual Polish mode, L2 interference was observed for the VOT parameter, but not for sandhi linking. It is suggested that this discrepancy may be related to the differing phonological status of the two phonetic parameters. In the code-switching tasks, VOTs were on the whole more English-like than in monolingual mode, but this appeared to be a matter of individual performance. An increase in the rate of sandhi linking in the code-switches, except for the case of one speaker, appeared to be a function of accelerated production of L1 target items

Designing an Artificial Robotic Interaction Language

The project described hereunder focuses on the design and implementation of a "Artificial Robotic Interaction Language", where the research goal is to find a balance between the effort necessary from the user to learn a new language and the resulting benefit of optimized automatic speech recognition for a robot or a machine