Phonetics and Phonology Commons^™

From Study Design To Conference Presentation In One Semester: Introducing Students To The Research Process In Laboratory Phonology, Caroline Smith

Pedagogical Approaches to Laboratory Phonology

The purpose of this presentation is todiscuss my experience of taking a class through the entireprocess of a laboratory phonology research study in a single semester, in fact, in about threemonths.

Vowel Category And Meanings Of Size In Tolkien's Early Lexicons, Lucas Annear

Journal of Tolkien Research

The grounds for studying phonetic symbolism (phonosemantics, etc.) in Tolkien's invented languages were well established by Tolkien through comments made in letters, drafts of his works, and essays. Previous researchers (e.g., Smith, 2006; 2007; Gymnich, 2005) have discussed the aesthetic effects of Tolkien's elvish languages on his audience, and have also observed connections between a range of meanings and sounds in Tolkien's languages (e.g., Fimi, 2008; Rausch, 2013). However, no researchers have explored this area of study with quantitative methods. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between vowel quality and meanings of size in the Gnomish …

Musical Ability And Accent Imitation, Maria Murljacic

Honors Scholar Theses

This study investigates the intersection of musical ability and accent imitation, more specifically defining what factors cause a relationship between the two. The study was run on 50 participants, who each completed an accent imitation ability assessment, a musical ability assessment, and an articulation ability assessment. The scores for the accent imitation portion were rated by anonymous online raters. Each participant filled out a questionnaire on prior musical experience and were either classified as a musician or non-musician. The analysis found that those in the musician group performed better on the musical ability, articulation, and accent ability assessment than non-musicians. …

An Instrumental Study Of Front Oral Monophthongs In Kensiu, Azizan Adilah

Student Works (2020-2029)

This paper acoustically examines the front oral vowels of Kensiu, a highly endangered Austroasiatic language spoken in Peninsular Malaysia. Although there have been initial studies on the phonology of Kensiu, (Bishop, 1996; Burenhult, 2001), these are mainly on the variety spoken in Thailand. This far, there is a lack of studies especially those based on the acoustic analysis. The changes in the sounds of Kensiu are likely to have taken place with increasing contact with the local Malay community in Kedah where the only Kensiu village is located. This paper aims to fill the gap by examining the acoustic properties …

Khmer Phonetics & Phonology: Theoretical Implications For Esl Instruction, Alex Donley

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis develops an approach to English teaching for Khmer-speaking students that centers on Khmer phonetics and phonology. Cambodia has a strong demand for English instruction, but consistently underperforms next to other nations in terms of proficiency. A significant reason for Cambodia’s skill gap is the lack of research into linguistic hurdles Khmer speakers face when learning English. This paper aims to bridge Khmer and English with an understanding of the speech systems that both languages use before turning to the unique challenges Khmer speakers must overcome based on the tenets of L1 Transfer Theory. It closes by outlining strategies …

Speech Exemplar And Evaluation Database (Seed) For Clinical Training In Articulatory Phonetics And Speech Science, Marisha Speights Atkins, Dallin J. Bailey, Suzanne E. Boyce

Faculty Publications

One challenge faced by teachers of phonetics, speech science, and clinical speech disorders courses is providing meaningful instruction that closes the theory to practice gap. One barrier to providing this type of deep learning experience is the lack of publicly available examples of speech recordings that illustrate comparisons between typical and disordered speech production across a broad range of disorder populations. Data of this type exist, but are typically collected for specific research projects under narrowly written IRB protocols that do not allow for release of even de-identified speech recordings to other investigators or teachers. As a partial corrective to …

“This Is A Stunning, Stunning Night”: News Media Constructions Of Emotional Reality, Karrina Janelle Oravetz

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

The news media is one of the main influences of people’s perception, especially during elections. It can have an influence on a voter’s perception during and after the results of an election. One of the issues that arises is that news reports are biased, which affects viewers’ perceptions and interpretations of the information reported. This paper presents an analysis of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in the genre of news media and further shows that prosodic features is another layer of analysis in CDA. I am looking specifically at how news broadcasts construct information after the 2016 election results. News media …

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, …

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 …

Gay Male Speech And Dialects In Motion: Constructing Linguistic Identity In Southern New Hampshire, Hayden P. Stinson

Honors Theses and Capstones

The study of gay male speech has largely focused on fundamental frequency and various quantifiable aspects of /s/ (Campbell-Kibler 2012, Mack and Munson 2012, Munson 2007, Zimman 2013). In a study of the speech of three gay men from California, however, Podesva (2011) concludes that gay men may utilize salient aspects of regional dialects to express their gayness. The stylistic correlation between gayness and certain regional dialects supports Eckert’s (2008) argument that linguistic styles are centered around ideologies, rather than rigid categorical identities and Podesva (2011) urges that this phenomenon be studied further. Southern New Hampshire provides an ideal landscape …

Pmkns For Pie: Parsed Morphological Katr Networks Of Sanskrit For Proto-Indo-European, Ryan Mark Mcdonald

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

In this thesis, I construct two computational networks for Sanskrit to test theories of nominal accentuation as a way of examining the simplicity of each theory. I will be examining the Paradigmatic Approach and the Compositional Approach to nominal accentuation. For the Paradigmatic Approach, nominals are categorized into mobile and static categories based on how the accent appears in the paradigm (Fortson 2010). For the Compositional Approach, accent mobility is a result of the combination of morphemes and their inherent accent states (Kirparsky 2010). To construct these networks, I use the KATR extension to the DATR language for lexical knowledge …

An Intonational Description Of African American Language In Princeville, Nc, Christopher M. Dale

Theses and Dissertations--Linguistics

This thesis uses data from the Princeville, NC section of the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL) in order to address two topics concerning language: first, what the intonation of the Princeville participants of the CORAAL looks like acoustically; and second, if intonation is the salient feature that categorizes a speaker as Black or non-Black. The acoustic analysis software, Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2019), is used to take average, minimum, and maximum f0 measurements for 16 participants (9 women and 7 men) across three age groups. From these measurements, the rate of change is calculated in Hz/second to determine …

Altered Speech: A Case-Study Of Identity-Driven Speech In A Dissociative Identity Disorder System, Sarah Domin

Scripps Senior Theses

The field of sociolinguistics has long been interested in how speech differs across groups. These studies have been focused on how demographic factors like class, race, and geographical region alter speech patterns. However, more recently, the agency of individuals to use language as a tool to construct a certain identity or persona has been highlighted (e.g., Podesva 2007; Eckert 1989; Eckert 2008). These studies are limited due to the nature of their methods, relying on either one individual with a limited scope of characteristics or on a larger group of people with many different variables at play other than identity. …

Language Transfer Between English And German: A Phonetics-Based Study Of Interactions Between Speakers' Native And Second-Language Vowel Systems, Emelia Bensonmeyer

Scripps Senior Theses

The present study addresses language contact processes in which the phonetic systems of the languages that bilinguals speak interact. Specifically, language transfer with respect to English and German was examined, focusing on native German speakers (L1) who learned English as a second language (L2). It employed as its central method an analysis of their vowel systems, both language-specifically and cross-linguistically. Extralinguistic variables were also considered, ranging from speakers’ age of acquisition (AOA) of English to their length of residence in an English-speaking environment to their consideration of home. Results indicated statistically significant differences between speakers’ production of /ɪ/ and /ʊ/ …

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 …

The Interaction Of Domain-Initial Effects With Lexical Stress: Acoustic Data From English, Spanish, And Portuguese, Ricardo F. Napoleão De Souza

Linguistics ETDs

The phonetic implementation of domain-initial boundaries has gained considerable attention in the literature. However, most studies of the phenomenon have investigated small samples of articulatory data in which target syllables were lexically prominent and/or phrasally accented, introducing important potential confounds. This dissertation tackles these issues by examining how domain-initial effects operate on the acoustic properties of fully unstressed word-initial CV syllables in phrasally unaccented words. Similar materials were designed for a reading task in which 14 speakers of English, Spanish and Portuguese, languages that differ in how lexical prominence affects segmental makeup, took part. Results from the acoustic analyses show …

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 …