Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Social And Structural Factors In The Development Of Baltimore's Low Back Vowels, Aidan J. Malanoski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is concerned with the low back vowels of Baltimore English: what low back systems occur, and how these systems have changed among Black and white Baltimoreans. I draw on two sources of data: 48 interviews that I conducted with natives of Baltimore and its inner suburbs, and 18 oral history interviews that were conducted from 1978 to 1981. In Chapter 3, I argue for the inclusion of the pre-rhotic sets START and NORTH in typologies of English low back vowels. With these sets included, several previously unattested low back systems are found in Baltimore. These are united by …

Lingual Articulatory Configuration Of Japanese Devoiced Vowels, Rion Iwasaki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In Tokyo Japanese, high vowels /i/ and /u/ are devoiced with high frequency between two voiceless obstruents. There is an ongoing outstanding debate in the literature on whether devoiced vowels maintain their lingual articulation or are deleted. To contribute to this debate from a lingual articulatory perspective, the current study uses ultrasound imaging of the tongue and various acoustic measurements. Data from 11 native speakers of Tokyo Japanese are analyzed. This is the first lingual articulatory study to examine both devoiced /i/ and /u/ from more than three speakers. All speakers provide articulatory and acoustic evidence that devoiced /i/ and …

Introduction To Phonology Ling 323, Ibrahim Abu Elrob

Open Educational Resources

The sound system of languages and underlying representation of the sound structure and lexicon. Analysis of data from different languages; investigation of the differences and similarities in the sound systems of different languages. Exploration of language universals.

Factors Affecting Pretonic Deletion In English Syllables: A Corpus Study, Whitney Barnett-Rhodes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One type of variation in pronunciation that is associated with fast and/or conversational speech is massive reduction, in which entire syllables are deleted. We focus on a subtype of massive reduction, pretonic vowel deletion, where the vowel in an unstressed syllable is deleted and the flanking consonants form an onset cluster, V --> φ / C__C, such as the word Columbus reduced to the two-syllable pronunciation [klʌmbəs], resulting in the onset cluster [kl]. The main question asks what predictors are associated with pretonic vowel deletion. Furthermore, we evaluate the Lexicalist Hypothesis and Sonority Projection as explanations of the phenomenon. …

Diaspora Documentation Of West Albay Bikol, Nhia Borja

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper presents a comprehensive linguistic analysis and cultural documentation of West Albay Bikol, a dialect spoken in Bikol, Philippines. Drawing upon narratives spoken by a native speaker, this study aims to expand the literature on Bikolano language and add the dialects of Balugo and Polangui to the conversation. The motivation for the project stems from a personal aspiration to learn West Albay Bikolano and provide authentic language examples.

The paper comprises six chapters. The first chapter briefly overviews Bikol dialects and Central Philippine languages and reviews existing literature on the overall Bikol language. The second chapter is an examination …

Prosodic Marking Of Focus In Autistic And Neurotypical Adults, Nishtha N. Trivedi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Purpose: This study investigates how adult autistic speakers compare with neurotypical speakers in the manipulation of prosody to mark narrow and contrastive focus in American English. In particular, it explores whether the two groups differ in terms of pitch accent status, pitch accent type, and overall nuclear contour patterns in focus marking.

Methods: We conducted an experiment eliciting speech from autistic and neurotypical adults in which we compared their use of pitch accent in answers to wh-questions and in corrective statements.

Results: We found neurotypical speakers to primarily use H* to mark narrow focus on subjects and L+H* to mark …

The Elusive Endonym, Thomas Eccardt

Publications and Research

The term ‘exonym’ was coined in 1957 by Marcel Aurousseau, an Australian geographer, to denote a place name used in a non-native language. ‘Endonym’ was later coined analogously as its counterpart, meaning the native name for a place. An example exonym would be the English word Germany, referring to the country whose inhabitants know it as its endonym Deutschland. These terms are useful to cartographers and also the United Nations, since it publishes documents in its six official languages, referring to places all over the world.

The topic of endonyms and exonyms would seem to fall into the …

Exploring Cross-Linguistic Speech Perception In Hindi, English, And Romance-Language Through Temporal Dynamics Of Neural Activity, Yuga Kothari

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the effect of linguistic experience on the neural processing of Voice Onset Time (VOT) in Hindi and Romance language (Spanish and Portuguese) individuals who are bilingual in English and monolingual English speakers using the event-related potential (ERP) Mismatch Negativity (MMN) response. VOT is a linguistic property that measures the time elapsed between the release of a stop consonant and the beginning of voicing, that is, vocal fold vibration of a following vowel. In a double-oddball paradigm, participants’ (n = 41) ERP were recorded while listening to speech sounds differing in VOT. The bilabial short lag stop [p] …

Memetic Epidemiology: A Mathematical Model For Tracking The Spread Of Linguistic Features Across Western Europe, Benjamin Shavitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this dissertation is to introduce a powerful new method for demonstrating the role of contact in potential cases of linguistic contact spread, Memetic Epidemiology, that can facilitate extensive future research. This dissertation introduces and demonstrates the use of this method on examples from Western and Central Europe.

Part I begins by providing theoretical background for Memetic Epidemiology using understandings, including Memetics, and Evolutionary Phonology and its extensions. Part I proceeds to lay out the objective of Memetic Epidemiology: to provide a new means of demonstrating that contact influenced the rise of linguistic features in certain languages during …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Spe-29 - Voice & Articulation (Intro Assignment), Laura Spinu

Open Educational Resources

This assignment is asking students to collaboratively create a database of "good" and "bad" voices for subsequent analysis.

Spe-29 - Voice & Articulation (Advanced Assignment), Laura Spinu

Open Educational Resources

This two-part assignment introduces students to spectrogram reading by asking them (1) to explore a set of spectrograms representing the days of the week, and then (2) record their own spectrogram and add a picture of it to a common "Mystery Spectrograms" folder for use in a subsequent assignment (and also in classroom activities).

NOTE: by the time this assignment is introduced, the students have already learned how to record themselves and save sound files using the Praat software for acoustic analysis. If they are not familiar with the procedure, this tutorial will help:

Making a recording in PRAAT

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 …

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 …

Cot In The Act: Ethnicity And Age Affects Phonemic Perception Of The Low-Back Merger In New York City English, Omar Ortiz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

ABSTRACT

This paper is an experimental study on how perceptions about a speaker’s age and ethnicity may influence whether listeners perceive the THOUGHT / LOT distinction. The macro-categories of age and ethnicity have been found to correlate with the lowering of raised THOUGHT (Wong 2012, Becker 2010) and the favoring of the merged vowels in perception (Haddican et al. 2016). This thesis examines whether images of faces associated with different age and ethnicity categories condition perception of auditory stimuli as belonging to either the LOT or THOUGHT class. This thesis builds on previous results suggesting that non-linguistic information influences speech …

Testing The Perceptual Magnet Effect In Monolinguals And Bilinguals, Michael C. Stern

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Previous research has demonstrated an apparent warping of the perceptual space whereby the best exemplars or ‘prototypes’ of speech sound categories minimize the perceptual distance between themselves and neighboring stimuli in the same category. This phenomenon has been termed the ‘perceptual magnet effect’ (PME). The present study extends work on the PME to a speech sound category previously unstudied in this paradigm (American English /æ/), and to bilingual speech sound representation and perception. American English monolinguals and Turkish-English bilinguals completed identification tasks, category goodness rating tasks, and same-different discrimination tasks with synthesized vowel sounds from the American English /æ/ category—not …

Phonologically-Informed Speech Coding For Automatic Speech Recognition-Based Foreign Language Pronunciation Training, Anthony J. Vicario

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) and computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) systems used in foreign-language educational contexts are often not developed with the specific task of second-language acquisition in mind. Systems that are built for this task are often excessively targeted to one native language (L1) or a single phonemic contrast and are therefore burdensome to train. Current algorithms have been shown to provide erroneous feedback to learners and show inconsistencies between human and computer perception. These discrepancies have thus far hindered more extensive application of ASR in educational systems.

This thesis reviews the computational models of the human perception of American …

Computational Approaches To The Syntax–Prosody Interface: Using Prosody To Improve Parsing, Hussein M. Ghaly

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prosody has strong ties with syntax, since prosody can be used to resolve some syntactic ambiguities. Syntactic ambiguities have been shown to negatively impact automatic syntactic parsing, hence there is reason to believe that prosodic information can help improve parsing. This dissertation considers a number of approaches that aim to computationally examine the relationship between prosody and syntax of natural languages, while also addressing the role of syntactic phrase length, with the ultimate goal of using prosody to improve parsing.

Chapter 2 examines the effect of syntactic phrase length on prosody in double center embedded sentences in French. Data collected …

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, …

Prepositional Phrase Attachment Ambiguities In Declarative And Interrogative Contexts: Oral Reading Data, Tyler J. Peckenpaugh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Certain English sentences containing multiple prepositional phrases (e.g., She had planned to cram the paperwork in the drawer into her briefcase) have been reported to be prone to mis-parsing of a kind that is standardly called a “garden path.” The mis-parse stems from the temporary ambiguity of the first prepositional phrase (PP1: in the drawer), which tends to be interpreted initially as the goal argument of the verb cram. If the sentence ended there, that would be correct. But that analysis is overridden when the second prepositional phrase (PP2: into her briefcase) is encountered, since the …

Stabilizing Forces In Acoustic Cultural Evolution: Comparing Humans And Birds, Daniel C. Mann

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Learned acoustic communication systems, like birdsong and spoken human language, can be described from two seemingly contradictory perspectives. On one hand, learned acoustic communication systems can be remarkably consistent. Substantive and descriptive generalizations can be made which hold for a majority of populations within a species. On the other hand, learned acoustic communication systems are often highly variable. The degree of variation is often so great that few, if any, substantive generalizations hold for all populations in a species.

Within my dissertation, I explore the interplay of variation and uniformity in three vocal learning species: budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus), …

Neural Indices Of Vowel Discrimination In Monolingual And Bilingual Infants And Children, Yan H. Yu, Carol Tessel, Henry Han, Luca Campanelli, Nancy Vidal, Jennifer Gerometta, Karen Garrido-Nag, Hia Datta, Valerie L. Shafer

Publications and Research

Objectives: To examine maturation of neural discriminative responses to an English vowel contrast from infancy to 4 years of age and to determine how biological factors (age and sex) and an experiential factor (amount of Spanish versus English input) modulate neural discrimination of speech.

Design: Event-related potential (ERP) mismatch responses (MMRs) were used as indices of discrimination of the American English vowels [ε] versus [I] in infants and children between 3 months and 47 months of age. A total of 168 longitudinal and cross-sectional data sets were collected from 98 children (Bilingual Spanish–English: 47 male and 31 female …

Articulation Of The Japanese Moraic Nasal: Place Of Articulation, Assimilation, And L2 Transfer, Ai Mizoguchi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The moraic nasal /N/ in Japanese has been transcribed in multiple ways, but very few studies have examined its articulation. The nature of its assimilation has often been described in phonology, but again, very few articulatory investigations have been conducted. Also, while a first language (L1) effect on second language (L2) production has been discussed for some phonemes, there is no good research on the effect of Japanese /N/ on L2 English syllable-final nasals. This dissertation investigates the articulation of the moraic nasal /N/ in Japanese using an ultrasound articulatory imaging technique to assess 1) its place of articulation, 2) …

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 …

Phonetic Properties Of Oral Stops In Three Languages With No Voicing Distinction, Stephanie M. Kakadelis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Almost all studies on the phonetics of oral stop voicing patterns focus on languages with a voicing distinction. This gives rise to some debate regarding which aspects of voicing patterns arise from inherent articulatory effects related to the production of a voicing distinction, and which aspects are intentional adjustments by speakers meant to enhance a phonological contrast.

This study investigates the phonetic properties of oral stops in three No Voicing Distinction (NVD) languages; Bardi (bcj), Arapaho (arp), and Sierra Norte de Puebla Nahuatl (azz). NVD languages do not utilize the larynx to maintain a contrast between any two sounds in …

English Influence On L2 Speakers’ Production Of Palatalization And Velarization, Jennifer C. Gabriele

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Irish is a Celtic language spoken in Ireland. It is currently endangered with only 73,803 people using the language on a daily basis as of 2016 (Official Office of Statistics, 2016). The reason for the decline is that English is the dominate language, pushing Irish to the periphery. Revitalization efforts have been put into place in an attempt to revitalize the language. There has been a growth in L2 speakers of Irish. The position of English as the dominate language, and high amounts of L2 speakers creates an environment where English is likely to influence the Irish language. The purpose …