Language Description and Documentation Commons^™

Exploring Strategies For Modeling Sign Language Phonology, Lee Kezar, Riley Carlin, Tejas Srinivasan, Zed Sehyr, Naomi Caselli, Jesse Thomason

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Like speech, signs are composed of discrete, recombinable features called phonemes. Prior work shows that models which can recognize phonemes are better at sign recognition, motivating deeper exploration into strategies for modeling sign language phonemes. In this work, we learn graph convolution networks to recognize the sixteen phoneme “types” found in ASL-LEX 2.0. Specifically, we explore how learning strategies like multi-task and curriculum learning can leverage mutually useful information between phoneme types to facilitate better modeling of sign language phonemes. Results on the Sem-Lex Benchmark show that curriculum learning yields an average accuracy of 87% across all phoneme types, outperforming …

The Distribution Of Tone In Shanghainese Monosyllables: An Optimality Theory Approach, Jamie Xu

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This paper aims to create an Optimality Theory ranking of tonal phonology constraints in Shanghai Chinese (Shanghainese) monosyllables. Previous research on tonal phonology in Shanghainese preceded the more recent research on Optimality Theory which may provide new principles to justify the language’s tonal phonology system. I use inputs composed of High (H) and Low (L) tone combinations and 8 constraints, (3 faithfulness and 5 markedness constraints) to motivate the distribution of tones in Shanghainese monosyllable in four environments: KV, GV, KVʔ, GVʔ. The faithfulness constraints include DEP, MAX, and IDENT. The markedness constraints include *KL, *GH, POLARITY, [AGREE]ʔ, and *L/ʔ. …

Improving Sign Recognition With Phonology, Lee Kezar, Jesse Thomason, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

We use insights from research on American Sign Language (ASL) phonology to train models for isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), a step towards automatic sign language understanding. Our key insight is to explicitly recognize the role of phonology in sign production to achieve more accurate ISLR than existing work which does not consider sign language phonology. We train ISLR models that take in pose estimations of a signer producing a single sign to predict not only the sign but additionally its phonological characteristics, such as the handshape. These auxiliary predictions lead to a nearly 9% absolute gain in sign recognition …

Endangered Languages: A Sketch Of The Sengwer Sound System, Jamas Nandako

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

Within the next century as many as half of the world’s seven thousand languages, are poised to become extinct at an alarmingly accelerated rate (Evans 2010). This correlates to a loss of knowledge, collective and individual identities, and social values. This loss is not only one of the most serious issues facing humanity today, but also it is representative of an unspeakable loss of information invaluable to humanity. This is so because these languages are among our few sources of evidence for understanding human history and each of these languages embodies unique local knowledge of the cultures and natural systems …

Phonetic Contrast In New York Hasidic Yiddish Vowels: Language Contact, Variation, And Change, Chaya R. Nove

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study analyzes the acoustic correlates of the length contrast in New York Hasidic Yiddish (HY) peripheral vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/, and compares them across four generations of native speakers for evidence of change over time. HY vowel tokens are also compared to English vowels produced by the New York-born speakers to investigate the influence of language contact on observed changes. Additionally, the degree to which individual speakers orient towards or away from the Hasidic community is quantified via an ethnographically informed survey to examine its correlation with /u/-fronting, a sound change that is widespread in the non-Hasidic English-speaking …

An Interactive Visual Database For American Sign Language Reveals How Signs Are Organized In The Mind, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Ariel Goldberg, Karen Emmory, Naomi Caselli

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

"We are four researchers who study psycholinguistics, linguistics, neuroscience and deaf education. Our team of deaf and hearing scientists worked with a group of software engineers to create the ASL-LEX database that anyone can use for free. We cataloged information on nearly 3,000 signs and built a visual, searchable and interactive database that allows scientists and linguists to work with ASL in entirely new ways."

The Asl-Lex 2.0 Project: A Database Of Lexical And Phonological Properties For 2,723 Signs In American Sign Language, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr, Naomi Caselli, Ariel M. Cohen-Goldberg, Karen Emmory

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

ASL-LEX is a publicly available, large-scale lexical database for American Sign Language (ASL). We report on the expanded database (ASL-LEX 2.0) that contains 2,723 ASL signs. For each sign, ASL-LEX now includes a more detailed phonological description, phonological density and complexity measures, frequency ratings (from deaf signers), iconicity ratings (from hearing non-signers and deaf signers), transparency (“guessability”) ratings (from non-signers), sign and videoclip durations, lexical class, and more. We document the steps used to create ASL-LEX 2.0 and describe the distributional characteristics for sign properties across the lexicon and examine the relationships among lexical and phonological properties of signs. Correlation …

Prosody And Intonation In Formosan Languages, Benjamin K. Macaulay

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Formosan languages are the languages of the Aboriginal peoples of Taiwan. These languages are part of the Austronesian language family, and represent all but one primary branch of this family of 1,200+ languages. The Formosan languages are endangered, some critically so. While these languages have seen attention in the literature for their syntactic and phonological systems, little work has been done on their prosodic structure or intonation.

This dissertation analyzes the prosodic structure and intonational phonology of Mantauran Rukai, Budai Rukai, Tsou, Kanakanavu, Hla’alua, Sandimen Paiwan, Piuma Paiwan, Kavalan, Amis, Bunun, Tgdaya Seediq, Truku Seediq, and Pazeh, based on …

Language Contact And Covert Prominence In The Sḥerēt-Jibbāli Language Of Oman, Jarred Brewster

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis reports on a phonetic production study, the results of which support the existence of a complex word-prosodic system for the Sḥerēt-Jibbāli language of Dhofar, Oman. In the language, stress seems to co-occur in some lexical items with a high tone. In the discussion, a mechanism for the emergence of this system is proposed as the reflex of a typological feature held in common with the related language, Soqotri, and as justification for an Eastern Modern South Arabian subgroup consisting of Sḥerēt-Jibbāli and Soqotri.

The Sounds Of Sikles Gurung: A Phonetic And Phonological Description Of A Tibeto-Burman Language Of Nepal, Danielle Ronkos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation describes the sound system of the Sikles variety of Gurung, or Tamu Kyui, a Tibeto-Burman minority language of Nepal. Drawing on data collected with the help of Sikles Gurung speakers living in Nepal and New York between 2014 and 2018, it presents evidence that the phonetics and phonology of this variety differ from descriptions of other varieties. Major findings include contrastive vowel duration, a 2-category register system rather than the 4-tone system reported for other varieties, and allophonic secondary consonant articulations assigned by the backness of adjacent vowels and glides. The secondary articulation system is linked to the …

Khmer Phonetics & Phonology: Theoretical Implications For Esl Instruction, Alex Donley

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis develops an approach to English teaching for Khmer-speaking students that centers on Khmer phonetics and phonology. Cambodia has a strong demand for English instruction, but consistently underperforms next to other nations in terms of proficiency. A significant reason for Cambodia’s skill gap is the lack of research into linguistic hurdles Khmer speakers face when learning English. This paper aims to bridge Khmer and English with an understanding of the speech systems that both languages use before turning to the unique challenges Khmer speakers must overcome based on the tenets of L1 Transfer Theory. It closes by outlining strategies …

Optimal Linearization: Prosodic Displacement In Khoekhoegowab And Beyond, Leland Kusmer

Doctoral Dissertations

Understanding the relationship between syntactic structures and linear strings is a challenge for modern syntactic theories. The most complete and widely accepted models — namely, the Headedness Parameter and the Linear Correspondence Axiom (Kayne, 1994) — each capture aspects of this relationship, but are either too permissive or two restrictive: A Headedness Parameter relativized to individual categories permits nearly any linear order which keeps phrases contiguous, even those that violate the Final-Over-Final Constraint (Sheehan et al. 2017); by contrast, the Linear Correspondence Axiom is well-known for ruling out head-final configurations generally. Subsequent models of linearization have typically been modifications of …

The Synchronic And Diachronic Phonology Of Nauruan: Towards A Definitive Classification Of An Understudied Micronesian Language, Kevin Hughes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Nauruan is a Micronesian language spoken in the Republic of Nauru, a small island nation in the central Pacific. Lack of data and difficulty in analysis has hindered progress in better understanding Nauruan for decades, particularly regarding its phonology and its classification within the Micronesian family. Because of these challenges, earlier researchers have presented their work on Nauruan as highly tentative. This dissertation establishes more confident analyses of Nauruan phonology, sound change and classification, which have been made possible through original fieldwork.

Approximately one hundred hours of digital recordings have been collected as part of this research, including wordlists, phrases, …

Text-Speech Alignment: A Robin Hood Approach For Endangered Languages, Claire Bowern, Rikker Dockum, Sarah Babinski, Hunter Craft, Anelisa Fergus, Dolly Goldenberg

Yale Day of Data

Forced alignment automatically aligns audio recordings of spoken language with transcripts at the level of individual sounds, greatly reducing the time required to prepare data for linguistic analysis. However, existing algorithms are mostly trained on a few well-documented languages. We test the performance of three algorithms against manually aligned data on data from a highly endangered language. At least some tasks, unsupervised alignment (either based on English or trained from a small corpus) is sufficiently reliable for it to be used on legacy data for low-resource languages. Descriptive phonetic work on vowel inventories and prosody can be accurately captured by …

Final Vowel Devoicing In Blackfoot, Samantha Leigh Prins

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

This thesis presents a study of final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot, an indigenous language of Montana and Alberta. Previous research on final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot variously suggests word-final, phrase-final, and utterance-final vowel devoicing processes (e.g. Taylor 1965, Bliss & Gick 2009, Frantz 2017), though, the conditioning environment for this phenomenon had not been a research focus prior to this study. The present study investigates intonation units (IUs) as the conditioning domain for final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot.

Final vowel devoicing in Blackfoot is investigated here by examining the common word-final suffixes –wa (3SG.AN) and –yi (4SG) in two recordings …

Non-Manual Articulators In Irish Sign Language Verbs: An Analysis With Data Mining Association Rules, Robert G. Smith, Markus Hofmann

Conference Papers

The Signs of Ireland (SOI) corpus (Leeson et al., 2006) deploys a complex multi-tiered temporal data structure. The process of manually analyzing such data is laborious, cannot eliminate bias and often, important patterns can go completely unnoticed. In addition to this, as a result of the complex nature of grammatical structures contained in the corpus, identifying complex linguistic associations or patterns across tiers is simply too intricate a task for a human to carry out in an acceptable timeframe. This work explores the application of data mining techniques on a set of multi-tiered temporal data from the SOI corpus. Building …

The Sound Patterns Of Kachok In The Context Of Bahnaric And North-Bahnaric Studies, Emily L. Olsen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a description of the sound patterns of Kachok, Austroasiatic language spoken in northeastern Ratanakiri Province, Cambodia. The language is spoken by approximately 3000 people and is considered endangered (Simons & Fennig, 2018). Kachok is undocumented, and this dissertation is the first attempt to describe the language and its sound patterns. The goals of this dissertation are twofold: to contribute to linguistics and the science of phonetics and phonological typology, as well as increase the body of work on Austro-Asiatic languages, and to create resources for the Kachok language, culture, and people that have the potential to outlive …

Purepecha Aspirated Consonants And Their Phonetic Variants, Lluvia Camacho Cervantes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study describes phonetic realizations of aspirated phonemes in Purepecha [pua] from Azajo. The distribution of aspiration in Purepecha is limited to roots, a small number of spatial suffixes, one argument structure changing suffix, and clitics. Aspiration is never contrastive for inflexional suffixes, which occur in word final position. There are three basic allophones of aspirated segments: (i) post-aspirated; (ii) unaspirated, (iii) pre-aspirated, with pre-aspiration showing 4 distinct phonetic forms, depending on dialect, and phonetic context. Strengthening of pre-aspiration has been documented in the Lake and Sierra dialects as well as vowel lengthening in the Lake dialect. In Azajo Purepecha …

Understanding A Discourse Marker In Quito, Ecuador, Hannah Jesberger

Honors Projects

The present research project examines the possible factors to explain the word-final /f/ in Ecuadorian Spanish including but not limited to: where it is used, who uses it (gender, age ranges, social class), and with which words it is most commonly used. As the first extensive research study on the word-final /f/, the project may lead to other investigations of this phenomenon and other features of Ecuadorian Spanish. In addition, if there are other variations of the marker pues in the Spanish varieties spoken in different regions and/or countries, researchers can use this present study as basis to analyze the …

Songs, Lushootseed Language Institute, Zalmai Zeke Zahir

Lushootseed Language Institute

Song #1: This song refers to our language and culture. It is for us.

Song #2 This song is for the language.

Song #3: Greeting song. This song is used as a greeting by the Snoqualmie people.

Song #4: Shoes off song. This song is a celebration of taking our shoes off and reestablishing our connections to the Mother Earth.

Song #5: "Squirrel Song" The work is kind of easy. This is a challenge dance song. The dance itself represents the squirrel's chasing each other as often times seen in the woods. It consists of hopping low to the ground …

Stress Variation As Unifying Features Of Upstate New York, Tracey Vail

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study investigates sociophonetic stress variation in the Onondaga County area of Upstate New York. I argue that five variations of stress correlate to factors of age, education level, place of residence, frequency, and analogical change. Dinkin and Evanini (2010) have examined and discovered similar outcomes of stress variation in his work with dialectal features across the state of New York. Rather than analyze the state and its borders in their entirety, I focus on morpheme-specific analogical change of stress in specific social categories within the Syracuse, New York region. In terms of lexical items, I analyze stress placement within …

Articulation And Acoustics Of Kannada Affricates: A Case Of Geminate /ʧ/, Alexei Kochetov, N. Sreedevi

Alexei Kochetov

Affricates have been observed to be problematic in phonological acquisition and disordered speech across languages, due to their relatively complex spatial and temporal articulatory patterns. Remediation of difficulties in the production of affricates requires understanding of how these sounds are typically produced. This study presents the first systematic articulatory and acoustic investigation of voiceless geminate affricate /ʧ/ in Kannada (a Dravidian language), compared to the palatal glide and the voiceless dental stop. Ultrasound data from 10 normal speakers from Mysore, India revealed that /ʧ/ is produced with the tongue shape intermediate between the palatal glide and the dental stop, and …

The Mako Language: Vitality, Grammar And Classification, Jorge E. Rosés Labrada

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation focuses on the documentation and description of Mako, an indigenous language spoken in the Venezuelan Amazon by about 1000 people and for which the only available published material at the start of the project were 38 words. The main goals of the project were to create a collection of annotated ethnographic texts and a grammar that could serve as a starting point for both language maintenance in the community and for further linguistic research. Additionally, the project sought to assess the language’s vitality in the communities where it is spoken and to understand the relationship of Mako to …

Spatial And Dynamic Aspects Of Retroflex Production: An Ultrasound And Ema Study Of Kannada Geminate Stops, Alexei Kochetov, N. Sreedevi, Midula Kasim, R. Manjula

Alexei Kochetov

Abstract: This study investigates the production of geminate retroflex stops in Kannada using a combination of ultrasound and articulography. Data obtained from 10 native speakers of the language show that the retroflex gesture is dynamically complex and asymmetrical, involving an anticipatory retraction of the tongue tip, followed by the raising of this articulator towards the hard palate, and subsequent rapid flapping-out movement during the closure and the release. The retroflex constriction and the forward movement appear to be facilitated by the simultaneous fronting of the posterior tongue body, flattening of the anterior tongue body, and lowering of the jaw. Compared …

Phonological Parameters Of Indigenous And Asl Country Name-Signs, Carolyn J. Stephens

Journal of Interpretation

This investigation was guided by the following research questions: What are the American Sign Language (ASL) and indigenous signs for each country in the world? What phonological features do they exhibit? Are these features consistent with previous research on ASL? The research presented in this article is the result of a project that provides a comprehensive online compilation of country-name signs. A website was created to display both written descriptions and videos of the signs, and 180 countries with 314 total variations were identified, documented, recorded, coded and analyzed. A thorough literature review was conducted and an analysis of phonological …

[Sabbatical Report], Elizabeth Winkler

Sabbatical Reports

I am working to develop a English-Kpelle dictionary database for use in the electronic world as well as various paper dictionaries to be published and used primarily in Liberia. I input over 2200 entries into a database. Entries include information about pronunciation, meaning, grammar, spelling, etymology and related words. This database will be uploaded to the website as well as formatted for paper publication of the dictionaries.

Number Marking In Western Armenian: A Non-Argument For Outwardly-Sensitive Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy, Bert Vaux, Neil Myler, Karlos Arregi

Bert Vaux

The Western Armenian possessive plural data originally reported in Vaux (1998, 2003) have been asserted by Wolf 2011 to involve outwardly-sensitive phonologically conditioned allomorphy, a phenomenon widely argued to be unattested (Carstairs-McCarthy 1987; Paster 2006) and predicted to be impossible by the tenets of Distributed Morphology (Halle and Marantz 1993; Bobaljik 2000). We show that the full complexity of the Western Armenian system is better captured in an account that makes no reference to outwardly-sensitive phonological conditioning of this sort. The analysis is based on standard DM mechanisms of morpheme copying, displacement, and spellout (Harris and Halle 2005, Arregi and …

Retroflex Variation And Methodological Issues: A Reply To Simonsen, Moen, And Cowen (2008), Janne Bondi Johannessen, Bert Vaux

Bert Vaux

We argue that the differences in the articulation of Norwegian retroflex consonants described by Simonsen, Moen, and Cowen (2008) as individual variation may instead be due to factors such as individual and dialectal background, rather than variation across a single variety. Our main argument is based on existing dialect literature and speech corpus data, which show that the phonemes involved in the retroflexion process are not present in the same linguistic contexts in all dialects. SMC’s experimental stimuli and conditions include linguistic contexts which do not necessarily induce retroflexion naturally, and therefore cannot be relied upon to provide an accurate …

Shiwilu (Jebero), Pilar Valenzuela, Carlos Gussenhoven

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Articles and Research

Shiwilu (a.k.a. Jebero) is a critically endangered language from Peruvian Amazonia and one of the two members of the Kawapanan linguistic family. Most of its nearly 30 remaining fluent speakers live in and around the village of Jeberos (District of Jeberos, Province of Alto Amazonas, Loreto Region), at approximately 5° S, 75° W. The documentation of Shiwilu is scarce and no survey grammar is available. Until very recently, the only trained linguist who had worked on Shiwilu was John Bendor- Samuel, who carried out fieldwork in 1955–1956 and completed a doctoral thesis in 1958 (see Bendor-Samuel 1981 [1958]). An abridged …

The Armenian Dialect Of Khodorjur, Bert Vaux

Bert Vaux

No abstract provided.