Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Processing Differences In Reading Alliteration And Rhyme: An Eye-Movement Study, Keiko Bridwell

Senior Theses

In studies of silent reading, it is well-attested that the phonological content of a word, and not only its visual shape, contributes to the reading process. One of the most widely-observed phenomena in this field is the “tongue twister effect”: the tendency for words with repeated initial phonemes to be read more slowly and comprehended more poorly than words without phonological repetition. This effect has been welldocumented over decades of research; however, it has overwhelmingly dealt with wordinitial overlap, or alliteration. Very few studies have looked at the impact that word-final overlap, or rhyme, might have on reading. In the …

Cross-Linguistic Phonosemantics, Raleigh Anne Butler

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.

American English Speakers' Perception Of Non-Native Phonotactic Constraints: The Influence Of Training In Phonology, Bailey R. Pearson

Rehabilitation, Human Resources and Communication Disorders Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of the present study was to examine the differences between perceptions of non-native phonotactic rules and constraints by monolingual English-speaking undergraduate students in a program of communication disorders who had taken and passed a course in the study of phonology and by undergraduate students in communication disorders who had not yet taken a course in phonology. Participants listened to audio recordings of words from Hindi, Hmong, Kurdish, Russian, and Swedish recorded by speakers fluent in those languages. Each of the words contained at least one phonotactic constraint that is not permitted in American English phonology. Participants were instructed …

Tblt And L2 Pronunciation: Do The Benefits Of Tasks Extend Beyond Grammar And Lexis?, Laura Gurzynski-Weiss, Avizia Long, Megan Solon

Faculty Publications

Introduction to the Special Issue.

Acoustic Classification Of Focus: On The Web And In The Lab, Jonathan Howell, Mats Rooth, Michael Wagner

Department of Linguistics Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

We present a new methodological approach which combines both naturally-occurring speech harvested on the web and speech data elicited in the laboratory. This proof-of-concept study examines the phenomenon of focus sensitivity in English, in which the interpretation of particular grammatical constructions (e.g., the comparative) is sensitive to the location of prosodic prominence. Machine learning algorithms (support vector machines and linear discriminant analysis) and human perception experiments are used to cross-validate the web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. Results con rm the theoretical predictions for location of prominence in comparative clauses and the advantages using both web-harvested and lab-elicited speech. The most robust …

(In)Variability In The Samoan Syntax/Prosody Interface And Consequences For Syntactic Parsing, Kristine M. Yu, Edward P. Stabler

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

While it has long been clear that prosody should be part of the grammar influencing the action of the syntactic parser, how to bring prosody into computational models of syntactic parsing has remained unclear. The challenge is that prosodic information in the speech signal is the result of the interaction of a multitude of conditioning factors. From this output, how can we factor out the contribution of syntax to conditioning prosodic events? And if we are able to do that factorization and define a production model from the syntactic grammar to a prosodified utterance, how can we then define a …

The Role Of Time In Phonetic Spaces: Temporal Resolution In Cantonese Tone Perception, Kristine M. Yu

Linguistics Department Faculty Publication Series

The role of temporal resolution in speech perception (e.g. whether tones are parameterized with fundamental frequency sampled every 10 ms, or just twice in the syllable) is sometimes overlooked, and the temporal resolution relevant for tonal perception is still an open question. The choice of temporal resolution matters because how we understand the recognition, dispersion, and learning of phonetic categories is entirely predicated on what parameters we use to define the phonetic space that they lie in. Here, we present a tonal perception experiment in Cantonese where we used interrupted speech in trisyllabic stimuli to study the effect of temporal …

Toggling The Switches, Zach Thomas

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research

In this paper, I use Richard Lanham's work within the field of rhetoric to explore the rhetorical implications of multilingualism and code switching. Specifically, I will discuss and question some of the basic assumptions of employing another language: What is at stake when we communicate with others in another language, especially native speakers? How might using an L2 language and recognizing/using different dialects within that language cause a speaker to reconsider their native tongue? What does the presence of numerous regional peculiarities and nonstandard varieties within languages say about our desire for "ideal" or "standard" speech?

Review Of _Harmonic Grammar And Harmonic Serialism_, Eric Baković

Eric Baković

Acoustic Classification Of Focus: On The Web And In The Lab, Jonathan Howell, Mats Rooth, Michael Wagner

Jonathan Howell

Language Analysis Skills Of Children With Mental Retardation, Hyla Rubin

Hyla Rubin

The ability of children with moderate mental retardation to analyze orally presented sentences into words and words into syllables and phonemes was studied. The subjects, ages 10 to 15, were grouped by method of reading instruction. All of them could analyze spoken sentences into words and words into syllables equally well. However, subjects receiving code-emphasis reading instruction performed significantly better on the more difficult phoneme manipulation tasks than did subjects receiving whole-word instruction. Results suggest that code-emphasis reading instruction for some subjects with mental retardation should be used. Further research on linguistic analysis skills and the use of code-emphasis reading …

Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, And Exceptions, Aleksei I. Nazarov

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores new perspectives in phonological hidden structure learning (inferring structure not present in the speech signal that is necessary for phonological analysis; Tesar 1998, Jarosz 2013a, Boersma and Pater 2016), and extends this type of learning towards the domain of phonological features, towards derivations in Stratal OT (Bermúdez-Otero 1999), and towards exceptionality indices in probabilistic OT. Two more specific themes also come out: the possibility of inducing instead of pre-specifying the space of possible hidden structures, and the importance of cues in the data for triggering the use of hidden structure. In chapters 2 and 4, phonological features …

Phonological Awareness: Normally Developing And Language Delayed Children, Hyla Rubin

Hyla Rubin

This study compared 15 nonnal and 13 language delayed fourand five-year-old children on a range of tasks of phonological awareness. The tasks differed in the degree of explicit linguistic analysis that was required. The language delayed group always performed below the level of the nonnal children, and there were significant group differences on several tasks. A significant interaction effect reflected the greater difficulty language delayed children experienced with tasks that required the most explicit analysis. The tasks used in this study could be used in intervention research with language delayed children. They can also be used in therapy and classroom …

A Diachronic Approach To The Confusion Of B With V In Spanish, Eva Núñez-Méndez

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

This volume presents specific topics in diachronic Hispanic linguistics. These topics include: lexical survivals in Ibero-Romance, Arabisms, lexical variation in early modern Spain, the origins of the confusion of b with v, Andalusian Spanish in the Americas, the expansion of seseo and yeísmo, processes of koineization, syntactic change in scribal documentation from the Middle Ages, and the semantic changes of the verbs ser, estar and haber. It provides a comprehensive analysis of the Spanish lexicon, phonetics, morphosyntax, dialectology and semantics with the input of ten prominent scholars.

It focuses not only on relevant issues in the evolution of Spanish but …

Contextualized Recognition Of Fingerspelled Words, Campbell Mcdermid, Lynn Finton, Alexis Chasney

Journal of Interpretation

Fingerspelling, an aspect of American Sign Language, is difficult for second language English-speaking adults to learn (Bahleda, 1998), yet mastery is required by professional ASL-English interpreters. This study compared novice and expert interpreters’ interpretation of fingerspelled words under the assumption that exposure to priming material in their L1, English, would enable the interpreters to recognize those terms when fingerspelled in their L2, ASL. In this study, participants (15 novices, 15 experts) were asked to interpret an ASL text with 25 “carefully” fingerspelled words embedded. Ten subjects were not given priming materials, ten a list of words in printed English that …

Therapy Dogs In The College Classroom: The Effect Of Dogs On Stress, Anxiety, And Spanish L2 Phonological Learning And Performance, Elaine Maralee Henry

Doctoral Dissertations

Anxiety and stress invoked by the second language classroom setting has the ability to cause numerous detrimental physiological changes which impair the learning process. A more natural, “immersion” type atmosphere is often desired when teaching a second language; however, this is not typically possible with college classes. Therefore, the addition of therapy dogs to college second language classes may be a beneficial solution since therapy dogs are frequently cited as having the ability to lower stress and anxiety in many different settings. Stroking and interacting with a dog may reduce many markers of stress, including blood pressure, heart rate, and …

What’S In A Name? Sound Symbolism And Coffee Shops, Claire Anderson

Linguistics Senior Research Projects

This study explores the relationship between sound symbolism and coffee shop names. Specifically, phonetic qualities in coffee shop names have crossmodal associations with other sensory experiences such as taste, sight, sound, and touch. Previous studies show a strong association between product or brand name and consumer preference; therefore, a study of coffee shop names is worthwhile in expanding the corpus of sound symbolism knowledge. A phonetic analysis of top-rated coffee shops in the United States, paired with a survey, shows that a balance of stops and smoother phonemes (fricatives, nasals, laterals, etc.), as well as a mixture of front and …

¿Vera O Verra? Using Principles Of Task-Based Language Teaching To Practice Spanish Rhotics, Avizia Long

Faculty Publications

Research on task-based language teaching and learning has demonstrated that tasks may encourage second/foreign language development, specifically by facilitating conditions believed to engage processes that are important for second language acquisition to occur (Robinson, 2011; Skehan, 2014). Recent studies conducted by Solon, Long, and Gurzynski-Weiss (2014, 2015) have demonstrated that tasks designed to make pronunciation task essential do encourage learner attention to pronunciation, and increasing task complexity leads to greater accuracy in the production of the Spanish vowels [o] and [u]. This micro-teaching lesson, inspired by Solon et al., will showcase a task designed to make the pronunciation of the …

The Representation Of Probabilistic Phonological Patterns: Neurological, Behavioral, And Computational Evidence From The English Stress System, Claire Moore-Cantwell

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation investigates the cognitive mechanism underlying language users' ability to generalize probabilistic phonological patterns in their lexicon to novel words. Specifically, do speakers represent probabilistic patterns using abstract grammatical constraints? If so, this system of constraints would, like categorical phonological generalizations (a) be limited in the space of possible generalizations it can represent, and (b) apply to known and novel words alike without reference to specific known words. I examine these two predictions, comparing them to the predictions of alternative models. Analogical models are specifically considered. In chapter 3 I examine speakers' productions of novel words without near lexical …

Effects Of Online Repetition Practice With Animated Visual Aid On The Acquisition Of Japanese Pitch Accent And Special Moras, Natsumi Suzuki, Mayu Miyamoto

Purdue Linguistics, Literature, and Second Language Studies Conference

This preliminary study examines the effectiveness of online repetition practice using an animated visual aid, "Karaoke Style", in promoting acquisition of Japanese pitch accent and special moras that could be applied to the curriiculum without using any class time.