Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

Segmental Error Gravity In L2 Arabic Speech Comprehensibility And Accentedness: L1 Consonant Age Of Acquisition As A Predictor, Mark Papai

Theses and Dissertations

Second language (L2) pronunciation studies have found that the intelligibility (i.e., listeners’ actual understanding) of L2 speech is most closely related to its comprehensibility (i.e., listeners' ease of understanding) rather than to its overall nativelike pronunciation. The segmental errors that are most detrimental to communication are predicted by phoneme Functional Load (FL): mispronouncing high FL segments affects speech comprehensibility more negatively than mispronouncing low FL ones. However, no data are available on the FL hierarchy of Arabic segments. On the other hand, FL correlates highly with consonant age of acquisition (CAoA) in languages that rely heavily on consonants to contrast …

Destigmatizing Working With Dyslexic Learners, Riley N. Dandurand

Writing Center Journal

In the field of writing center research there is a paucity of information regarding tutoring students with dyslexia. This comes as no surprise considering it is only in the last 50 years that there has been a conscious effort to include those who have exceptionalities in all areas of education. In addition to a lack of research and training there is another issue that arises with disclosing exceptionalities. Those studying dyslexia have found that students are hesitant to disclose their learning disability because of the stigma and feelings of differentiation from their peers (Brizee et al., 2012). The question then …

Exploring Strategies For Modeling Sign Language Phonology, Lee Kezar, Riley Carlin, Tejas Srinivasan, Zed Sehyr, Naomi Caselli, Jesse Thomason

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

Like speech, signs are composed of discrete, recombinable features called phonemes. Prior work shows that models which can recognize phonemes are better at sign recognition, motivating deeper exploration into strategies for modeling sign language phonemes. In this work, we learn graph convolution networks to recognize the sixteen phoneme “types” found in ASL-LEX 2.0. Specifically, we explore how learning strategies like multi-task and curriculum learning can leverage mutually useful information between phoneme types to facilitate better modeling of sign language phonemes. Results on the Sem-Lex Benchmark show that curriculum learning yields an average accuracy of 87% across all phoneme types, outperforming …

Extending Finite-State Models Of Reduplication To Tone In Thai, Casey D. Miller, Aniello De Santo

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Languages exhibiting both tonal and reduplication processes pose a challenge for finite-state technologies. In this sense, Markowska et al. (2021) propose a combination of 2-way FSTs and multi-tape FSTs in order to simultaneously deal with total reduplication on the segmental level and independent tonal processes on the autosegmental level. Here, we evaluate this model for reduplication processes in Thai, which shows total reduplication both for tones and segments, and we suggest that the expressivity of 2-way FSTs is needed at both levels.

Rethinking Representations: A Log-Bilinear Model Of Phonotactics, Huteng Dai, Connor Mayer, Richard Futrell

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

Models of phonotactics include subsegmental representations in order to generalize to unattested sequences. These representations can be encoded in at least two ways: as discrete, phonetically-based features, or as continuous, distribution-based representations induced from the statistical patterning of sounds. Because phonological theory typically assumes that representations are discrete, past work has reduced continuous representations to discrete ones, which eliminates potentially relevant information. In this paper we present a model of phonotactics that can use continuous representations directly, and show that this approach yields competitive performance on modeling experimental judgments of English sonority sequencing. The proposed model broadens the space of …

Evaluating A Phonotactic Learner For Mitsl-(2,2) Languages, Jacob K. Johnson, Aniello De Santo

Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics

We provide an implementation of De Santo and Aksënova (2021) 's grammatical inference learning algorithm for Multiple Input-sensitive Tier-based Strictly Local languages (De Santo and Graf, 2019) — following the standard of SigmaPie (Aksënova, 2020), and evaluate it on an array of patterns with varying degrees of (subregular) complexity. MISTL languages are able to capture the interaction of local and non-local constraints, and while also handling multiple dependencies simultaneously. Their practical learnability thus has strong implications for the viability of grammatical inference/subregular approaches to phonotactic learning broadly. Additionally, the transparency and provable correctness of the learning algorithms developed for such …

The Distribution Of Tone In Shanghainese Monosyllables: An Optimality Theory Approach, Jamie Xu

Senior Honors Papers / Undergraduate Theses

This paper aims to create an Optimality Theory ranking of tonal phonology constraints in Shanghai Chinese (Shanghainese) monosyllables. Previous research on tonal phonology in Shanghainese preceded the more recent research on Optimality Theory which may provide new principles to justify the language’s tonal phonology system. I use inputs composed of High (H) and Low (L) tone combinations and 8 constraints, (3 faithfulness and 5 markedness constraints) to motivate the distribution of tones in Shanghainese monosyllable in four environments: KV, GV, KVʔ, GVʔ. The faithfulness constraints include DEP, MAX, and IDENT. The markedness constraints include *KL, *GH, POLARITY, [AGREE]ʔ, and *L/ʔ. …

L’Emprunt Lexical De L’Arabe Algérien À L’Amazighe : Étude Sur Un Corpus Parémiologique, Abdelaziz Berkai

Journal of Amazigh Studies

Résumé :

Une étude très récente de parémiologie contrastive entre le kabyle et l’arabe algérien montre, par-delà l’« isomorphisme » parémiologique existant entre les deux langues-cultures, qu’un certain nombre de mots de l’arabe dialectal seraient des emprunts à l’amazighe. C’est l’étude de ces emprunts au plan lexico-sémantique, et subsidiairement étymologique, qui constitue l’objet de notre proposition de contribution. Nous commencerons chaque fois par la vérification des données en arabe classique et en dialectal algérien, avant d’analyser les matériaux amazighs et d’en tirer les conclusions qui s’imposent.

Mots-clés : emprunt lexical, parémiologie, arabe algérien, et langue amazighe

Lexical borrowing of Algerian …

Fathi Ben Maammar, Tinfas Seg Jerba - Ḥikāyāt Amāzīghiyya Jarbiyya, Vermondo Brugnatelli

Journal of Amazigh Studies

N/A

Improving Sign Recognition With Phonology, Lee Kezar, Jesse Thomason, Zed Sevcikova Sehyr

Communication Sciences and Disorders Faculty Articles and Research

We use insights from research on American Sign Language (ASL) phonology to train models for isolated sign language recognition (ISLR), a step towards automatic sign language understanding. Our key insight is to explicitly recognize the role of phonology in sign production to achieve more accurate ISLR than existing work which does not consider sign language phonology. We train ISLR models that take in pose estimations of a signer producing a single sign to predict not only the sign but additionally its phonological characteristics, such as the handshape. These auxiliary predictions lead to a nearly 9% absolute gain in sign recognition …

Comparing Speech Sound Production Skills Across Two-Year Olds With Varying Language Proficiency Using Phonetic Inventory And Word-Shape Complexity, Makayla Eberly

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Purpose. Young children, who by the time they are two years of age, have 50 or fewer words in their expressive lexicon and produce few to no two-words phrases are often identified as demonstrating “late language emergence” (LLE). The nature of the relationship between speech sound (phonological) production development and LLE continues to be an important area of inquiry in the field of speech-language pathology with clinical intervention implications. The present study aimed to further distinguish and confirm associations between phonological productions and language proficiency status at two years of age.

Method. Participants (n = 20) were divided into two …

"Does This Make Sense?": The Effect Of Congruent Guise In Regional Accent On Grammatical Acceptability Judgments, Nour Kayali

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This study seeks to unite sociophonetic speech perception and syntax research by presenting participants with congruent or incongruent social expectations during a structural grammaticality judgement task. Participants completed a between-subjects matched guise survey with place-based grammatical structures spoken in either a congruent place-based, local accent or a nonlocal accent. Place-based structures are consistently rated more acceptable in the local accent than the nonlocal. These results suggest that judgment of grammaticality results from an interplay of sociocultural expectations with accent and sentence structure. Judgement of structural grammaticality is not independent of social expectation.

Phonotactic Learning With Distributional Representations, Max A. Nelson

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation explores the possibility that the phonological grammar manipulates phone representations based on learned distributional class memberships rather than those based on substantive linguistic features. In doing so, this work makes three primary contributions. First, I propose three novel algorithms for learning a phonological class system from the distributional statistics of a language, all of which are based on partitioning graph representations of phone distributions. Second, I propose a new method for fitting Maximum Entropy phonotactic grammars, MaxEntGrams, which offers theoretical complexity improvements over the widely-adopted approach taken by Hayes and Wilson [2008]. Third, I present a series of …

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 …

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 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 …