Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Retroflex Harmony In Kalasha: Agreement Or Spreading?, Paul Arsenault, Alexei Kochetov

Alexei Kochetov

No abstract provided.

Coronal Place Contrasts In Argentine And Cuban Spanish: An Electropalatographic Study, Alexei Kochetov, Laura Colantoni

Alexei Kochetov

Theoretical and descriptive work on Spanish phonetics and phonology has been largely based on Peninsular varieties. This study uses electropalatography (EPG) to investigate articulatory characteristics of coronal consonant contrasts in Argentine and Cuban Spanish. Simultaneous EPG and acoustic data were collected from five speakers from Buenos Aires (Argentina) and three speakers from Havana (Cuba) reading sentences with various syllable-initial coronal consonants corresponding to the orthographic . As a control, the same data were collected from a single speaker of Peninsular Spanish from Madrid. As expected, the main distinction in both varieties was made between anterior and posterior coronal consonants ((denti-)alveolars …

Scales And Patterns Of Expressive Palatalization: Experimental Evidence From Japanese, Alexei Kochetov, John Alderete

Alexei Kochetov

This paper argues for the existence of expressive palatalization (E-Pal) – a phonologically unmotivated process that applies in sound symbolism, diminutive constructions, and babytalk registers. E-Pal is proposed to be grounded in iconic sound-meaning associations exploiting acoustic properties of palatalized consonants, and thus is inherently different from regular phonological palatalization (P-Pal). A cross-linguistic survey of patterns of E-Pal in 37 languages shows that it exhibits a set of properties different from P-Pal. As a case study, the paper focuses on patterns of palatalization in Japanese mimetic vocabulary and babytalk. Two experiments tested native speaker intuitions of these patterns and revealed …

Vot Drift In Three Generations Of Heritage Language Speakers In Toronto, Melania Hrycyna, Natalia Lapinskaya, Alexei Kochetov, Naomi Nagy

Alexei Kochetov

No abstract provided.

On The Interaction Of Variation And Exceptionality In Modern Hebrew Spirantization, Michal Martinez

Michal Temkin Martinez

Modern Hebrew (MH) spirantization is a variable phenomenon with many exceptions. Adam (2002) claims that the variation is driven by the exceptions and concludes that spirantization is changing, yielding what is currently a variable grammar, with expected and variant forms in free variation, and moving toward one with no alternation. This paper reports the results of an acceptability rating task showing that, in alternating segments, the expected form is still rated as more acceptable than that variant forms, and that which variant surfaces (stop or fricative) depend on its underlying root position. Additionally, participants indicate that some variation is acceptable …

Autosegmental Spreading In Optimality Theory, John J. Mccarthy

John J. McCarthy

Revised December 2009

This paper is a shorter (and probably better) version of "Harmony in Harmonic Serialism." Like its big brother, it argues that Harmonic Serialism answers the conundrum of how iterative autosegmental spreading is obtained in Optimality Theory.

Autosegmental Spreading In Optimality Theory, John J. Mccarthy

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

Revised December 2009

This paper is a shorter (and probably better) version of "Harmony in Harmonic Serialism." Like its big brother, it argues that Harmonic Serialism answers the conundrum of how iterative autosegmental spreading is obtained in Optimality Theory.

Frank Gouldsmith Speck Collection Index Of Penobscot Materials, Pauleena Macdougall

Field Notes/Notebooks

No abstract provided.

Prosodylab-Aligner: A Tool For Forced Alignment Of Laboratory Speech, Kyle Gorman, Jonathan Howell, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The Penn Forced Aligner automates the alignment process using the Hidden Markov Model Toolkit (HTK). The core of Prosodylab-Aligner is align.py, a script which performs acoustic model training and alignment. This script automates calls to HTK and SoX, an open-source command-line tool which is capable of resampling audio. The included README file provides instructions for installing HTK and SoX on Linux and Mac OS X, and can also be run on Windows. During training, the model is initialized with flat-start monophones, which are then submitted to a single round of model estimation. Then, a tied-state 'small pause' model is inserted …

Coarticulation And Assimilation In Korean Vowel Epenthesis, Kyumin Kim, Alexei Kochetov

Alexei Kochetov

This paper investigates acoustic properties of epenthetic vowels used in the adaptation of English loanwords with final obstruents in Korean (e.g. phokhI < folk, phochi < poach). An extensive analysis of spectral and durational properties of these vowels produced by six speakers of Seoul Korean reveals that loanword epenthesis is a categorical vowel insertion process. The quality of epenthetic vowels in the data was essentially identical to that of the native high vowels /i/ and /I/, depending on the place of articulation of the preceding consonant. Duration of epenthetic vowels was also similar to that of native vowels. These findings provide evidence for the phonological status of epenthesis and vowel coloring in loanwords into Korean, supporting some previous phonological accounts of the phenomenon, while questioning others. Importantly, the categorical vowel coloring in loanwords is different from gradient coarticulatory effects exerted by preceding consonants and non-adjacent vowels, which were also observed in the data. This underscores the importance of careful experimental investigation of vowel epenthesis, as a way of teasing apart phonological processes and phonetic effects.

Alveolar-To-Rhotic Coarticulation In North American English: A Preliminary Epg Study, Alexei Kochetov

Alexei Kochetov

This paper reports results of an electropalatographic (EPG) study of alveolar-torhotic coarticulation in North American English. Data with alveolars /d/ and /n/ occurring in various rhotic contexts were collected from a single female speaker. The results showed a continuum of backing of the primary constriction from alveolar to post-alveolar or retroflex as a function of the absence or presence of one or more rhotic segments in the word and their proximity to the alveolar. These findings are interpreted as coarticulation of alveolars to the more constrained rhotic approximant and rhotacized vowels, and to different degrees of overlap of alveolar and …

Palatalisation, Alexei Kochetov

Alexei Kochetov

No abstract provided.

Gestural Coordination In Spanish /S/ Weakening: An Electropalatographic Study, Alexei Kochetov, Laura Colantoni

Alexei Kochetov

This study uses electropalatography to investigate syllable-final weakening of /s/ in Argentine Spanish. Results from 5 speakers from Buenos Aires show that the process applies consistently to /s/ before consonants, both within and across words. The phonetic realization of the fricative varies systematically as a function of place of articulation of the following consonant, and is to some extent affected by word boundaries and stress.

Lenition, Naomi Gurevich

Naomi Gurevich

No abstract provided.

A Weighted Finite State Transducer Implementation Of Phoneme Rewrite Rules For English-To-Korean Pronunciation Conversion, Hahn Koo

Faculty Publications

Words change their phonetic as well as orthographic form when they are borrowed and used by speakers of another language. A formal model that properly captures this change has theoretical implications in phonology and practical applications in speech processing and machine transliteration. This paper describes a method for developing a finite- state model that predicts how English words and named entities are pronounced in Korean. The model predicts nativized pronunciation using weighted finite-state transducers implementing context-dependent phoneme rewrite rules derived from English-to-Korean pronunciation pairs and syllable phonotactics in Korean.

Current Patterns Of Variation In Modern Hebrew Spirantization, Michal Martinez

Michal Temkin Martinez

Modern Hebrew (MH) spirantization is a variable phenomenon with many exceptions. Adam (2002) claims that the variation is driven by these exceptions and concludes that spirantization is changing, yielding what is currently a variable grammar, with equal weight given to expected and variant forms. However, it is not known what the current stage of the grammar looks like. This paper reports the results of an acceptability rating task showing that the expected form is still rated as more acceptable than variant forms, and which variant surfaces (stop or fricative) depends on its underlying root position. MH has three stop/fricative pairs …

Phonetics In Phonology: Evidence From Scottish Gaelic Preaspiration, Ian D. Clayton

Ian D. Clayton

Through factorial typology, Optimality Theory is able to predict a range of theoretically possible grammars. However, factorial typology is sometimes too powerful a tool: there may be a systematic mismatch between the range of grammars predicted and those actually attested. Many scholars have offered solutions to this overgeneration problem; for instance, Wilson’s targeted constraints (2001), and Steriade’s P-map (2001) aim to constrain the predictive power of OT by invoking cognitive factors. However, other scholars (e.g. Ohala 2005, Barnes 2002, Myers 2002) assert that typological gaps may be accounted for through the diachronic operation of phonetic factors; it is therefore redundant …

Lenition, Naomi Gurevich

Faculty Research and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Spanish Nasal Assimilation Revisited: A Cross-Dialect Electropalatographic Study, Alexei Kochetov, Laura Colantoni

Alexei Kochetov

This study employs electropalatography to investigate the implementation of nasal assimilation in two Spanish dialects (Argentine and Cuban) that differ in the realization of word-final nasals as alveolar or velar. 5 speakers of Argentine and 3 speakers of Cuban Spanish were presented with various utterances containing nasals followed by labial, coronal, and dorsal stops and fricatives under two stress conditions. Results revealed that place assimilation of nasals was consistently accompanied by stricture assimilation. The process was generally categorical, that is, the final alveolar or velar nasal adopted the articulation of the following consonant. Nasal + fricative sequences, however, showed a …

Prosodylab-Aligner: A Tool For Forced Alignment Of Laboratory Speech, Kyle Gorman, Jonathan Howell, Michael Wagner

Jonathan Howell