Phonetic convergence in temporal organization during shadowed speech

The goal of this study was to examine phonetic convergence (when one imitates the phonetic characteristics of another talker) in various measures of temporal organization during shadowed speech across different American English dialects. Participants from the Northern and Midland American English dialect regions, plus several "mobile" talkers, were asked to read 72 sentences to establish a baseline for temporal organization, and then to repeat the same 72 sentences after Northern, Midland, and Southern model talkers. Measures of temporal organization (i.e., %V, ΔC, ΔV, rPVI-C, and nPVI-V) were calculated for the read sentences, shadowed sentences, and model talker sentences. Statistical analysis of the differences in distance between the model talker sentences and the shadowers' read and shadowed sentences, respectively, revealed significant convergence by all three shadowing groups toward the model dialects for ΔV, and significant divergence by Mobile talkers away from the model talkers for nPVI-V. Though the result of divergence by Mobile talkers was unexpected, both results provide evidence that support previous studies, which claim that social perception is a large contributing factor in convergence and divergence. These results are also consistent with previous findings demonstrating variation across dialects in temporal organization and, in addition, provide evidence for variation across dialects in convergence in temporal organization.The Ohio State University College of Arts and Sciences Undergraduate Research ScholarshipNo embargoAcademic Major: Linguistic

A Phonetic Distance Approach to Intelligibility between Mam Regional Dialects

Mam, an indigenous Mayan language spoken primarily in Guatemala, has considerable internal diversity among its regional dialects. The purpose of this thesis is to estimate their varying degrees of intelligibility and to present groups of dialects whose speakers can be reasonably expected to understand one another. The analysis consists of two parts, the computation of a phonetic distance network and a series of sociocultural interviews. Phonetic distance was measured by Levenshtein distance between cognates in word lists and analyzed with a Neighbor-Net network. Interviews with Mam speakers focused on subjective judgments of intelligibility, contact, and social attitudes. Four main dialect groups were found: Western, Southern, Todos Santos, and Seleguá. Intelligibility is projected to be high within groups and reduced across groups. With the recent wave of immigration from Guatemala to the United States, many monolingual speakers of Mam are interacting with US court, school, and hospital systems by way of an interpreter, but interpreters and clients from different regions do not always understand one another well. Dialect groupings based on intelligibility can inform the interpreter matching process, especially in high-stakes and time-sensitive environments such as the court system

New Perspectives in Sinographic Language Processing Through the Use of Character Structure

Chinese characters have a complex and hierarchical graphical structure carrying both semantic and phonetic information. We use this structure to enhance the text model and obtain better results in standard NLP operations. First of all, to tackle the problem of graphical variation we define allographic classes of characters. Next, the relation of inclusion of a subcharacter in a characters, provides us with a directed graph of allographic classes. We provide this graph with two weights: semanticity (semantic relation between subcharacter and character) and phoneticity (phonetic relation) and calculate "most semantic subcharacter paths" for each character. Finally, adding the information contained in these paths to unigrams we claim to increase the efficiency of text mining methods. We evaluate our method on a text classification task on two corpora (Chinese and Japanese) of a total of 18 million characters and get an improvement of 3% on an already high baseline of 89.6% precision, obtained by a linear SVM classifier. Other possible applications and perspectives of the system are discussed.Comment: 17 pages, 5 figures, presented at CICLing 201

An Information Theoretic perspective on perceptual structure: cross-accent vowel perception

Analytical tools from Information Theory were used to quantify behaviour in cross-accent vowel perception by Australian, London, New Zealand, Yorkshire and Newcastle UK listeners. Results show that Australian listeners impose expected patterns of perceptual similarity from their own accent experience on unfamiliar accents, regardless of the actual phonetic distance between accents

The phonetics of second language learning and bilingualism

This chapter provides an overview of major theories and findings in the field of second language (L2) phonetics and phonology. Four main conceptual frameworks are discussed and compared: the Perceptual Assimilation Model-L2, the Native Language Magnet Theory, the Automatic Selection Perception Model, and the Speech Learning Model. These frameworks differ in terms of their empirical focus, including the type of learner (e.g., beginner vs. advanced) and target modality (e.g., perception vs. production), and in terms of their theoretical assumptions, such as the basic unit or window of analysis that is relevant (e.g., articulatory gestures, position-specific allophones). Despite the divergences among these theories, three recurring themes emerge from the literature reviewed. First, the learning of a target L2 structure (segment, prosodic pattern, etc.) is influenced by phonetic and/or phonological similarity to structures in the native language (L1). In particular, L1-L2 similarity exists at multiple levels and does not necessarily benefit L2 outcomes. Second, the role played by certain factors, such as acoustic phonetic similarity between close L1 and L2 sounds, changes over the course of learning, such that advanced learners may differ from novice learners with respect to the effect of a specific variable on observed L2 behavior. Third, the connection between L2 perception and production (insofar as the two are hypothesized to be linked) differs significantly from the perception-production links observed in L1 acquisition. In service of elucidating the predictive differences among these theories, this contribution discusses studies that have investigated L2 perception and/or production primarily at a segmental level. In addition to summarizing the areas in which there is broad consensus, the chapter points out a number of questions which remain a source of debate in the field today.https://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHX9K99Bl31vMZNRWL-YmU7O2p1tG2wHhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHX9K99Bl31vMZNRWL-YmU7O2p1tG2wHhttps://drive.google.com/open?id=1uHX9K99Bl31vMZNRWL-YmU7O2p1tG2wHAccepted manuscriptAccepted manuscrip

Life on the Edge: A sociophonological analysis of diphthong variation and change

This paper presents an innovative socio-phonological analysis of dialect variation and change. The analysis uses sociolinguistic data regarding the diphthongs |au|, |ai| and |ei| in Mersea Island English, a variety of British English. The trajectory of change shown by the data, as well as certain aspects of contextual variation (namely Canadian Raising) will provide the basis for outlining a three-tiered model that represents both internal (linguistic) and external (sociolinguistic) factors on variation and, ultimately, change . The model draws on the mechanics of both Dispersion Theory and Optimality Theory. This allows for system optimisation in the underlying phonology to be represented alongside optimal candidate selections after phonetic contextual information becomes available. The outputs from these levels, together with other possible surface variants, are then shown to have sociolinguistic associations that influence which form is ultimately selected as the surface form