Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Anglo And Hispanic Vowel Variation In New Mexican English, Susan Brumbaugh

Linguistics ETDs

This study examines vowel formant differences between English speakers in New Mexico that self-identify as Anglo versus those that self-identify as Hispanic. Audio recordings were made of 16 New Mexicans reading short stories and carrier phases with embedded target words. F1 and F2 measurements were compared at the 50% point for monophthongs and at the 20% and 80% points for diphthongs. Mixed effects models assessed statistical significance of ethnicity, gender, and interactional effects on vowel formants and trajectory length.

All speakers showed a near-complete overlap of BOT and BOUGHT tokens, supporting a merger. Hispanic men and women patterned together to …

Constructing A Grammatically Enriched Children's Book, Rebecca Ebert

Honors Projects

The intended purpose of this book is to serve as a grammatically rich resource of the grammatical structure: third person singular present tense. It is targets preschool age children with or at risk for a specific language impairment (SLI). More specifically, this book can be used as a clinical tool by speech-language pathologists in order to assist those with language delays in acquiring this difficult structure. Third person singular present tense is a morpheme that is acquired later in child language development due to its complexity, rarity and acoustic factors. Creating a clinical resource with an abundance of third person …

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 …

Cuasi Nomás Inglés: Prosody At The Crossroads Of Spanish And English In 20th Century New Mexico, Jackelyn Van Buren

Linguistics ETDs

This dissertation investigates prosodic change in the long-term language contact setting of Traditional New Mexican Spanish (NMS). NMS prosody is perceptually distinct from other contemporary varieties of Spanish (Hills 1906, Bowen 1952, Lipski 2011), yet the features which make it unique have not been acoustically examined. This study hypothesizes that bilingualism with English has affected NMS prosody and analyzes three features which are known to differ between Spanish and English and therefore provide a quantitative point of comparison: pitch peak alignment, pitch variability, and rhythmic timing. These variables have been demonstrated to be susceptible to transfer in contact situations, including …

Vowel Formant Dispersion Reflects Severity Of Apraxia Of Speech, Dirk B. Den Ouden, Elena Galkina, Alexandra Basilakos, Julius Fridriksson

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Background: Apraxia of Speech (AOS) has been associated with deviations in consonantal voice onset time (VOT), but studies of vowel acoustics have yielded conflicting results. However, a speech motor planning disorder that is not bound by phonological categories is expected to affect vowel as well as consonant articulations.

Aims: We measured consonant VOTs and vowel formants produced by a large sample of stroke survivors, and assessed to what extent these variables and their dispersion are predictive of AOS presence and severity, based on a scale that uses clinical observations to rate gradient presence of AOS, aphasia, and dysarthria. …

Highly Complex Syllable Structure: A Typological Study Of Its Phonological Characteristics And Diachronic Development, Shelece Easterday

Linguistics ETDs

The syllable is a natural unit of organization in spoken language. Strong cross-linguistic tendencies in syllable size and shape are often explained in terms of a universal preference for the CV structure, a type which is also privileged in abstract models of the syllable. Syllable patterns such as those found in Itelmen qsaɬtxt͡ʃ ‘follow!’ and Tashlhiyt tsskʃftstt ‘you dried it (f)’ are both typologically rare and theoretically marginalized. This dissertation is an investigation of the properties of languages with highly complex syllable patterns. The aims are (i) to establish whether these languages share other linguistic features in common such that …

Comparing Malleability Of Phonetic Category Between [I] And [U], Reiko Kataoka, Hahn Koo

Faculty Publications

This study reports differential category retuning effect between [i] and [u]. Two groups of American listeners were exposed to ambiguous vowels ([i/u]) within words that index a phoneme /i/ (e.g., athl[i/u]t) (i-group) or /u/ (e.g., aftern[i/u]n) (u-group). Before and after the exposure these listeners categorized sounds from a [bip]-[bup] continuum. The i-group significantly increased /bip/ responses after exposure, but the u-group did not change their responses significantly. These results suggest that the way mental representation handles phonetic variation may influence malleability of each category, highlighting the complex relationship among distribution of sounds, their mental representation, and speech perception.

Individual And Group Differences In Sound Category Learning, Ben Carlstrom

Student Research Symposium

Abstract: We examined the role of procedural-, declarative-, and working-memory systems in adults learning novel sound categories. Adults have fully developed declarative-memory skills that sometimes inhibit their ability to learn implicitly/procedurally (Filoteo, Lauritzen, & Maddox, 2010). Models of impaired language like the Procedural Deficit Hypothesis suggest that procedural-memory deficits are predictive of language-learning outcomes (Lum, Conti-Ramsden, Page, & Ullman, 2011). This study tested the hypothesis that language structure is best learned implicitly/procedurally, which has implications for L2 learning and language impairment. The novel sound categories presented to participants varied along a phonologically non-native dimension, pitch, and a native dimension, vowel …

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 …

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.

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?

Phonetic Complexity Affects Children’S Mandarin Tone Production Accuracy In Disyllabic Words: A Perceptual Study, Puisan Wong, Winifred Strange

Publications and Research

This is the first study to examine the effect of phonetic contexts on children’s lexical tone production. Mandarin tones in disyllabic words produced by forty-four 2- to 6-year-old children and twelve mothers were low-pass filtered to eliminate lexical information. Native Mandarin speaking adults categorized the tones based on the pitch information in the filtered stimuli. All mothers’ tones were categorized with ceiling accuracy. Counter to the findings in most previous studies on children’s tone acquisition and the prevailing assumption in models of speech development that children acquire suprasegmental features much earlier than segmental features, this study found that children as …

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 …