Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Non-Prompted Speech

A reliable method for automatic phonetic transcription of non− prompted German speech has been developed at th

A mathematical model of speech aerodynamics

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Neutralization in Aztec Phonology – the Case of Classical Nahuatl Nasals

This article investigates nasal assimilation in Classical Nahuatl. The distribution of nasal consonants is shown to be the result of coda neutralization. It is argued that generalizations made for root and word level are disproportionate and cannot be explained through the means of rule-based phonology. It is shown that the process responsible for nasal distribution can only be accounted for by introducing derivational levels in Optimality Theor

Experimental Phonology

Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 207-22

Category-specific effects in Welsh mutation

In this paper we investigate category-specific effects through the lens of Welsh mutation. Smith (2011) and Moreton et al. (2017) show that English distinguishes nouns and proper nouns in an experimental blending task. Here we show that Welsh distinguishes nouns, verbs, personal names, and place names in the mutation system. We demonstrate these effects experimentally in a translation task designed to elicit mutation intuitions and in several corpus studies. In addition, we show that these effects correlate with lexical frequency. Deeper statistical analysis and a review of the English data suggests that frequency is a more explanatory factor than part of speech in both languages. We therefore argue that these category-specific effects can be reduced to lexical frequency effects.Open access journalThis item from the UA Faculty Publications collection is made available by the University of Arizona with support from the University of Arizona Libraries. If you have questions, please contact us at [email protected]

Neural correlates of indicators of sound change in Cantonese: evidence from cortical and subcortical processes

Across time, languages undergo changes in phonetic, syntactic and semantic dimensions. Social, cognitive and cultural factors contribute to sound change, a phenomenon in which the phonetics of a language undergo changes over time. Individuals who misperceive and produce speech in a slightly divergent manner (called innovators) contribute to variability in the society, eventually leading to sound change. However, the cause of variability in these individuals is still unknown. In this study, we examined whether such misperceptions are represented in neural processes of the auditory system. We investigated behavioral, subcortical (via FFR), and cortical (via P300) manifestations of sound change processing in Cantonese, a Chinese language in which several lexical tones are merging. Across the merging categories, we observed a similar gradation of speech perception abilities in both behavior and the brain (subcortical and cortical processes). Further, we also found that behavioral evidence of tone merging correlated with subjects’ encoding at the subcortical and cortical levels. These findings indicate that tone-merger categories, that are indicators of sound change in Cantonese, are represented neurophysiologically with high fidelity. Using our results, we speculate that innovators encode speech in a slightly deviant neurophysiological manner, and thus produce speech divergently that eventually spreads across the community and contributes to sound change