Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Examining Variability In Spanish Monolingual And Bilingual Phonotactics: A Look At Sc-Clusters, Katerina A. Tetzloff

Doctoral Dissertations

Current models of generative phonology have failed to address the variability that is observed in bilingual language patterns patterns. This dissertation addresses exactly that issue by examining the perception of Spanish sC-clusters in Spanish monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals.

Surface sC-clusters in onset position are prohibited in Spanish and are repaired by inserting a prothetic /e/ (sC $\rightarrow$ esC). English differs in that it allows sC-cluster onsets, and the structure of the sC-cluster has been shown to differ based on the sonority profile (i.e., s+stop clusters are bisyllabic, s+liquid clusters are tautosyllabic). A batch version of a Harmonic Grammar Gradual Learning …

Restrictive Tier Induction, Seoyoung Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation proposes the Restrictive Tier Learner, which automatically induces only the tiers that are absolutely necessary in capturing phonological long-distance dependencies. The core of my learner is the addition of an extra evaluation step to the existing Inductive Projection Learner (Gouskova and Gallagher 2020), where the necessity and accuracy of the candidate tiers are determined.

An important building block of my learner is a typological observation, namely the dichotomy between trigram-bound and unbounded patterns. The fact that this dichotomy is attested in both consonant interactions and vowel interactions allows for a unified approach to be used. Another important piece …

Examining The Linguistic Ideology "Throaty Sounds Are Bad For Performers": The History Of Negative Attitudes Towards Glottal Stops And Laryngealization In English, Dayle M. Towarnicky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis analyzes explicit metadiscourse (Johnstone et al 2006) on throaty sounds, primarily focused on glottal segments and non-modal constricted voice quality in English. Authors contributing to this metadiscourse are argued to be an offshoot of the speech chain network which valorized and circulated the English accent known as RP or Received Pronunciation, studied by Agha (2003). The evaluated texts center on English-speaking elocution, singing training, voice, speech, and voice care. The analysis shows glottal and guttural articulations are framed negatively and often discouraged by appeals to both health and aesthetics. Many authors in this performance speech chain network …

Vikings, Anglo-Saxons, And England: The Germanic Revival Of The 9th, 10th, And 11th Centuries, Amanda N. Boeing

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

In Search Of Phonetic Evidence For Prosodically-Motivated Aspiration, Mckinley Sprinkle

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This thesis examines the production and perception of aspiration in all possible levels of stress and word positions attested under the left-edge prosodic description theorized by Kiparsky (1979), Withgott (1982), and Jensen (2000), as well as in all attested environments for unaspirated voiceless stops. Through the metric of voice onset time (VOT), I phonetically test the realization of aspiration and examine its perception as categorical in several environments that are not acoustically salient. Through a production study and two linked perception studies I provide acoustic evidence in support of the phonological definition of categorical aspiration as prosodically-motivated in English, and …

Representing Multiple Dependencies In Prosodic Structures, Kristine M. Yu

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Association of tones to prosodic trees was introduced in Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988). This included: (i) tonal association to higher-level prosodic nodes such as intonational phrases, and (ii) multiple association of a tone to a higher-level prosodic node in addition to a tone bearing unit such as a syllable. Since then, these concepts have been broadly assumed in intonational phonology without much comment, even though Pierrehumbert and Beckman (1988)'s stipulation that tones associated to higher-level prosodic nodes are peripherally realized does not fit all the empirical data. We show that peripherally-realized tones associated to prosodic nodes can be naturally represented …

A Split-Gesture, Competitive, Coupled Oscillator Model Of Syllable Structure Predicts The Emergence Of Edge Gemination And Degemination, Francesco Burroni

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

The phonological mechanisms responsible for the emergence of edge geminates in phonological processes like the Italian Raddoppiamento (Fono-)Sintattico (RS) are an open issue. Previous analyses of Italian treat gemination of (i) word initial consonants, (ii) morpheme-final consonants, and (iii) word final consonants as separate processes brought about by dedicated rule/constraints. We argue that these edge gemination processes result from the same, independently established principles. Through computational simulation of the split-gesture, competitive, coupled oscillator model of syllable structure of Articulatory Phonology, we show that increases in closure duration typical of geminates arise from changes to consonant/vowel couplings. Word initial gemination follows …

Linguistic Complexity And Planning Effects On Word Duration In Hindi Read Aloud Speech, Sidharth Ranjan, Rajakrishnan Rajkumar, Sumeet Agarwal

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Our study investigates the impact of linguistic complexity and planning on word durations in Hindi read aloud speech. Reading aloud involves both comprehension and production processes, and we use measures defined by two influential theories of sentence comprehension, Surprisal Theory and Dependency Locality Theory, to model the time taken to enunciate individual words. We model planning processes using an information-theoretic measure we call FORWARD SURPRISAL, inspired by surprisal theory which has been prominent in recent psycholinguistic work. Forward surprisal aims to capture articulatory planning when readers incorporate parafoveal viewing during reading aloud. Using a Linear Mixed Model containing memory …

Maxent Learners Are Biased Against Giving Probability To Harmonically Bounded Candidates, Charlie O'Hara

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

One of the major differences between MaxEnt Harmonic Grammar (Goldwater and Johnson, 2003) and Noisy Harmonic Grammar (Boersma and Pater, 2016) is that in MaxEnt harmonically bounded candidates are able to get some probability, whereas in most other constraint-based grammars they can never be output (Jesney, 2007). The probability given to harmonically bounded candidates is taken from other candidates, in some cases allowing Max- Ent to model grammars that subvert some of the universal implications that are true in NoisyHG (Anttila and Magri, 2018). Magri (2018) argues that the types of implicational universals that remain valid in MaxEnt are phonologically …

Incomplete Neutralization In Articulatory Phonology, Sejin Oh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous studies have found small but significant phonetic traces of underlying distinctions for phonologically “neutralized” contrasts. This phenomenon, often called incomplete neutralization, has been found for final devoicing in many languages, (e.g., German; Port, Robert F. & O’Dell, 1985), but has also been reported for other neutralizing phenomena, including flapping in American English (Herd et al., 2010), monomoraic lengthening in Japanese (Braver & Kawahara, 2016), vowel deletion in French (Fougeron & Steriade, 1997), vowel epenthesis in Levantine Arabic (Gouskova & Hall, 2009), among others.

In my dissertation, I explore the (in)completeness of Russian palatalization in the Articulatory Phonology framework, implementing …

A Linguistic Analysis Of Rukiga Personal Names, Allen Asiimwe

Journal of the Language Association of Eastern Africa

The goal of the paper is to provide a linguistic description of the structure of personal names in a lesser studied Bantu language of Uganda, Rukiga (JE14). Data show that Rukiga personal names are presented as lexical entities but with underlying elaborate grammatical structures derived from the syntax, morphology, phonology and the lexicon of the language. Personal names in Rukiga form a special category of nouns derived from nouns, adjectives, verbs, phrases, clauses and full sentences. This study establishes that truncation, affixal derivation, lexicalization of phrases, clauses and sentences are employed in name-formation. The study further reveals that the socio-cultural …

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 …

The Effect Of Speaking Rate On Vowel Variability Based On The Uncontrolled Manifold Approach And Flow-Based Invertible Neural Network Modeling, Jaekoo Kang

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Variability is intrinsic to human speech production. One approach to understand variability in speech is to decompose it into task-irrelevant (“good”) and task-relevant (“bad”) parts with respect to speech tasks. Based on the uncontrolled manifold (UCM) approach, this dissertation investigates how vowel token-to-token variability in articulation and acoustics can be decomposed into “good” and “bad” parts and how speaking rate changes the pattern of these two from the Haskins IEEE rate comparison database. Furthermore, it is examined whether the “good” part of variability, or flexibility, can be modeled directly from speech data using the flow-based invertible neural networks framework. The …

Lexical Stress Realization In Mandarin Second Language Learners Of English: An Acoustic And Articulatory Study, Boram Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigated the acoustic and articulatory correlates of lexical stress in Mandarin second language (L2) learners of English, as well as in first language (L1) speakers. The present study used a minimal pair respective to stress location (e.g., OBject versus obJECT) obtained from a publicly available Mandarin Accented English Electromagnetic articulography corpus dataset. In the acoustic domain, the use of acoustic parameters (duration, intensity, F0, and vowel quality) was measured in stressed and unstressed vowels. In the articulatory domain, the positional information from tongue tip (TT), tongue dorsum (TD), upper lip (UL), lower lip (LL), and jaw (JAW) were …

Learning Phonology With Sequence-To-Sequence Neural Networks, Brandon Prickett

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation tests sequence-to-sequence neural networks to see whether they can simulate human phonological learning and generalization in a number of artificial language experiments. These experiments and simulations are organized into three chapters: one on opaque interactions, one on computational complexity in phonology, and one on reduplication. The first chapter focuses on two biases involving interactions that have been proposed in the past: a bias for transparent patterns and a bias for patterns that maximally utilize all of the processes in a language. The second chapter looks at harmony patterns of varying complexity to see whether both Formal Language Theory …

Language As The Medium: A Literature Review. Harnessing The Prolific Power Of Dramatic Language As A Therapeutic Tool In Drama Therapy, Edward Freeman

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Language in and of the theatre, with its palate of variegated writing styles and playwrights from throughout time, has the potential to be harnessed, focused, and systematized for use as a therapeutic tool within drama therapy – the field’s artistic medium. Drama therapy could benefit from having a specific medium germane to its artform which has the potential to provide practitioners with a common resource and means of communication, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning, as well as align the field with other creative arts therapies. Language encompasses all forms of human communication – speaking, writing, signing, gesturing, expressing facially – …

A Phonological Analysis Of The Word-Borrowing Process In VolapüK, Yutong Zhang

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This paper analyzes the phonological process present in the word-borrowing process in Volapük nulik, the later version of Volapük – one of the world’s first constructed international auxiliary languages that achieved more than a million speakers – through an analogy with the loanword adaptation process taking place in a natural language. It examines the emergent phonological patterns within this process, despite the inherited arbitrariness of any constructed languages, and compares them with the prescriptive rules regulating the word-borrowing process featured in its grammar. The paper is divided into three parts: Part I generalizes the syllable shape in Volapük from …

Accessing The Gray Area Between Phonetics And Phonology: The Development Of Vowel Length As A Subphonemic Cue, Abby Fergus

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Previous research has shown that speakers of English use vowel length as a subphonemic cue to the voicing of a following obstruent. Countless studies have demonstrated adults’ ability to make a voicing judgement based upon vowel length but studies with children have provided mixed and sometimes conflicting results. In the present study, we sought to first determine whether adults would exhibit varying sensitivity to vowel length based upon whether it is found in a position where it is predictive of the phonemic status of another sound (i.e. serving as a subphonemic cue). Second, we removed top-down information in order to …

Creaky Voice: Interactional Effects In Production And Perception, Victoria Anita Voorhees

Masters Theses

My thesis investigates creaky voice and how it functions interactionally within social situations, as well as how it is perceived by others. “Creaky voice” happens when a person speaks at their lowest range, also known as their “vocal fry.” This causes “a vocal effect produced by a very slow vibration of only one end of the vocal cords” (Crystal 1997, 98). I am interested in knowing which populations utilize creaky voice most. Additionally, I aim to explore how creaky voice is perceived by others. To conduct this investigation, I have conducted both a production and perception study. Within the production …